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).
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List of the most influential people
#5251
Camilo José Cela
#5259
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Camilo José Cela y Trulock, 1st Marquess of Iria Flavia was a Spanish novelist, poet, story writer and essayist associated with the Generation of '36 movement. He was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature "for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability".
Go to Profile#5252
Stephen Moore
#5260
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Stephen Moore is an American conservative writer and television commentator on economic issues. He co-founded and served as president of the Club for Growth from 1999 to 2004. Moore is a former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. He worked at The Heritage Foundation from 1983 to 1987 and again since 2014. Moore advised Herman Cain's 2012 presidential campaign and Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
Go to Profile#5253
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
#5261
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Chris Matthew Sciabarra is an American political theorist born and based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of three scholarly books—Marx, Hayek, and Utopia; Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical; and Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism—as well as several shorter works. He is also the co-editor, with Mimi Reisel Gladstein, of Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand and co-editor with Roger E. Bissell and Edward W. Younkins of The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom. His work has focused on topics including Objectivism, libertarianism , and dialectics.
Go to Profile#5254
Walter Noll
#5262
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Walter Noll was a mathematician, and Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University. He is best known for developing mathematical tools of classical mechanics, thermodynamics, and continuum mechanics.
Go to Profile#5255
Paul Begala
#5263
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Paul Edward Begala is an American political consultant and political commentator, best known as the former advisor to President Bill Clinton. Begala was a chief strategist for the 1992 Clinton–Gore campaign, which carried 33 states and made Clinton the first Democrat to occupy the White House in twelve years. As counselor to the President in the Clinton White House, he coordinated policy, politics, and communications.
Go to Profile#5256
Orin Kerr
#5264
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Orin Samuel Kerr is an American legal scholar and professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. He is known as a scholar in the subjects of computer crime law and internet surveillance. Kerr is one of the contributors to the law-oriented blog titled The Volokh Conspiracy.
Go to Profile#5257
Kevin Starr
#5265
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Kevin Owen Starr was an American historian and California's state librarian, best known for his multi-volume series on the history of California, collectively called "Americans and the California Dream."
Go to Profile#5258
Harold C. Schonberg
#5266
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Harold Charles Schonberg was an American music critic and author. He is best known for his contributions in The New York Times, where he was chief music critic from 1960 to 1980. In 1971, he became the first music critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. An influential critic, he is particularly well known for his encouragement of Romantic piano music and criticism of conductor Leonard Bernstein. He also wrote a number of books on music, and one on chess.
Go to Profile#5259
Bill Viola
#5267
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bill Viola is an American contemporary video artist whose artistic expression depends upon electronic, sound, and image technology in new media. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness.
Go to Profile#5260
John Elway
#5268
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
John Albert Elway Jr. is an American former professional football quarterback who spent his entire 16-year career with the Denver Broncos of the National Football League . Following his playing career, he then spent 11 years with the Broncos in various front office positions, eventually being promoted to general manager. Elway, along with former backup quarterback and head coach Gary Kubiak, are the only individuals to be associated with all three of the Broncos' Super Bowl wins.
Go to Profile#5261
Naomi Oreskes
#5269
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
#5262
Randall Munroe
#5270
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Randall Patrick Munroe is an American cartoonist, author, and engineer best known as the creator of the webcomic xkcd. Munroe has worked full-time on the comic since late 2006. In addition to publishing a book of the webcomic's strips, titled xkcd: Volume 0, he has written four books: What If?, Thing Explainer, How To, and What If? 2.
Go to Profile#5263
Bob Jessop
#5271
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Bob Jessop is a British academic who has published extensively on state theory and political economy. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Lancaster. Work Jessop's major contribution to state theory is in treating the state not as an entity but as a social relation with differential strategic effects. This means that the state is not something with an essential, fixed property, such as a neutral coordinator of different social interests, an autonomous corporate actor with its own bureaucratic goals and interests, or the "executive committee of the bourgeoisie", as often described by pluralists, elitists/statists, and conventional Marxists, respectively.
Go to Profile#5264
Marcus Feldman
#5272
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Areas of Specialization: Evolutionary Biology Marcus Feldman is co-director of the Center for Computational, Evolutionary, and Human Genomics and the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, and director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies at Stanford University. He earned degrees in mathematics and statistics from the University of Western Australia, a master of science in mathematics from Monash University, and a PhD from Stanford University. While collaborating with L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, he introduced a quantitative theory of cultural ...
Go to Profile#5265
Jan T. Gross
#5273
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
#5266
Dimitri Nanopoulos
#5274
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Dimitri V. Nanopoulos is a Greek physicist. He is one of the most regularly cited researchers in the world, cited more than 48,500 times across a number of separate branches of science. Biography Dimitri Nanopoulos was born and raised in Athens. His grandfather, Dimitris Nakas, was an Aromanian and an ardent Greek nationalist who had migrated at the beginning of the 20th century to New York, but in March 1914 traveled back to his native land in order to participate in the Greek struggle for northern Epirus, and died in 1916; Nanopoulos' father was born nine months prior. His father's name was Vaios.
Go to Profile#5267
Charles Plott
#5275
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Charles Raymond Plott is an American economist. He currently is Edward S. Harkness Professor of Economics and Political Science at the California Institute of Technology, Director, Laboratory for Experimental Economics and Political Science, and a pioneer in the field of experimental economics. His research is focused on the basic principles of process performance and the use of those principles in the design of new, decentralized processes to solve complex problems. Applications are found in mechanisms for allocating complex items such as the markets for pollution permits in Southern Calif...
Go to Profile#5268
Roy Walford
#5276
Overall Influence
1924 - 2004 (80 years)
Roy Lee Walford, M. D. was a professor of pathology at University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, a leading advocate of calorie restriction for life extension and health improvement, and a crew member of Biosphere 2.
Go to Profile#5269
Jean Shepherd
#5277
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Jean Parker "Shep" Shepherd Jr. was an American storyteller, humorist, radio and TV personality, writer, and actor. With a career that spanned decades, Shepherd is known for the film A Christmas Story , which he narrated and co-scripteded, based on his own semiautobiographical stories.
Go to Profile#5270
Charles Isherwood
#5278
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Charles Isherwood is an American theater critic. Education Isherwood is a graduate of Stanford University. Career Isherwood wrote for Backstage West in Los Angeles. In 1993, he joined the staff of Variety, where he was promoted to the position of chief theatre critic in 1998.
Go to Profile#5271
Richard A. Muller
#5279
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Richard A. Muller is an American physicist and emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also a faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In early 2010, Muller and his daughter Elizabeth Muller founded the group Berkeley Earth, an independent 501 non-profit aimed at addressing some of the major concerns of the climate change skeptics, in particular the global surface temperature record. In 2016, Richard and Elizabeth Muller co-founded Deep Isolation, a private company seeking to dispose of nuclear waste in deep boreholes.
Go to Profile#5272
J. M. G. Le Clézio
#5280
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio , usually identified as J. M. G. Le Clézio, of French and Mauritian nationality, is a writer and professor. The author of over forty works, he was awarded the 1963 Prix Renaudot for his novel Le Procès-Verbal and the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature for his life's work, as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization".
Go to Profile#5273
Michael Green
#5281
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Michael Boris Green is a British physicist and a pioneer of string theory. He is a Professor of Theoretical Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Queen Mary University of London, emeritus professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 2009 to 2015.
Go to Profile#5274
Brian McHale
#5282
Overall Influence
Brian G. McHale is a US academic and literary theorist who writes on a range of fiction and poetics, mainly relating to postmodernism and narrative theory. He is currently Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at Ohio State University. His area of expertise is Twentieth-Century British and American Literature.
Go to Profile#5275
Habib Bourguiba
#5283
Overall Influence
1903 - 2000 (97 years)
Habib Bourguiba was a Tunisian lawyer, nationalist leader and statesman who led the country from 1956 to 1957 as the prime minister of the Kingdom of Tunisia then as the first president of Tunisia . Prior to his presidency, he led the nation to independence from France, ending the 75-year-old protectorate and earning the title of "Supreme Combatant".
Go to Profile#5276
Antoine Predock
#5284
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Antoine Predock is an American architect based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the principal of Antoine Predock Architect PC, the studio he founded in 1967. Predock first gained national attention with the La Luz community in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first national design competition he won was held by the Nelson Fine Arts Center at Arizona State University. Predock's work includes the Turtle Creek House, built in 1993 for bird enthusiasts along a prehistoric trail in Texas, the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, and a new ballpark for the San Diego Padres, the Petco Park.
Go to Profile#5277
Lyal S. Sunga
#5285
Overall Influence
Lyal S. Sunga is a well-known specialist on international human rights law, international humanitarian law and international criminal law. Career Sunga is a visiting professor in Peace Studies and International Relations and Global Politics at The American University of Rome, visiting professor at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Lund University, Sweden, visiting professor at the Strathmore University School of Law in Nairobi, Kenya, and RWI visiting professor at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. He also teaches International Criminal Law, Human Rights,...
Go to Profile#5278
Marco Dorigo
#5286
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Marco Dorigo is a research director for the Belgian Funds for Scientific Research and a co-director of IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence lab of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He received a PhD in System and Information Engineering in 1992 from the Polytechnic University of Milan with a thesis titled Optimization, learning, and natural algorithms. He is the leading proponent of the ant colony optimization metaheuristic , and one of the founders of the swarm intelligence research field. Recently he got involved with research in swarm robotics: he is the coordinator of Swarm-bots: Swarms o...
Go to Profile#5279
David Blei
#5287
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
David Meir Blei is a professor in the Statistics and Computer Science departments at Columbia University. Prior to fall 2014 he was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. His work is primarily in machine learning.
Go to Profile#5280
Gregory Stanton
#5288
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Gregory H. Stanton is the former Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at the George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. He is best known for his work in the area of genocide studies. He is the founder and president of Genocide Watch, the founder and director of the Cambodian Genocide Project, and the Chair of the Alliance Against Genocide. From 2007 to 2009 he was the president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
Go to Profile#5281
Richard E. Ladner
#5289
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Richard Emil Ladner is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to both theoretical computer science and assistive technology. Ladner is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#5282
Burton Watson
#5290
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Burton Dewitt Watson was an American sinologist, translator, and writer known for his English translations of Chinese and Japanese literature. Watson's translations received many awards, including the Gold Medal Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University in 1979, the PEN Translation Prize in 1982 for his translation with Hiroaki Sato of From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, and again in 1995 for Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o. In 2015, at age 88, Watson was awarded the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation for his long and prolific translation caree...
Go to Profile#5283
Salvatore Mancuso
#5291
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Salvatore Mancuso Gómez, also known as "el Mono Mancuso", "Santander Lozada" or "Triple Cero" , among other names is a Colombian paramilitary leader, once second in command of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia paramilitary group. The paramilitary groups commanded by Mancuso fought the guerrillas , and financed their activities by receiving donations from land owners, drug trafficking, extortions and robbery.
Go to Profile#5284
Ken MacLeod
#5292
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Kenneth Macrae MacLeod is a Scottish science fiction writer. His novels The Sky Road and The Night Sessions won the BSFA Award. MacLeod's novels have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Campbell Memorial awards for best novel on multiple occasions. A techno-utopianist, MacLeod's work makes frequent use of libertarian socialist themes; he is a three-time winner of the libertarian Prometheus Award. Prior to becoming a novelist, MacLeod studied biology and worked as a computer programmer. He sits on the advisory board of the Edinburgh Science Festival. MacLeod has b...
Go to Profile#5285
Muriel Spark
#5293
Overall Influence
1918 - 2006 (88 years)
Dame Muriel Sarah Spark was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Life Muriel Camberg was born in the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh, the daughter of Bernard Camberg, an engineer, and Sarah Elizabeth Maud . Her father was Jewish, born in Edinburgh of Lithuanian immigrant parents, and her English mother had been raised Anglican. She was educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls , where she received some education in the Presbyterian faith. In 1934–35 she took a course in "commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She taught English for a ...
Go to Profile#5286
Frank Auerbach
#5294
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Frank Helmut Auerbach is a German-British painter. Born in Germany, he has been a naturalised British subject since 1947. He is considered one of the leading names in the School of London, with fellow artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
Go to Profile#5287
Arnold Palmer
#5295
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Arnold Daniel Palmer was an American professional golfer who is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most charismatic players in the sport's history. Dating back to 1955, he won numerous events on both the PGA Tour and the circuit now known as PGA Tour Champions. Nicknamed The King, Palmer was one of golf's most popular stars and seen as a trailblazer, the first superstar of the sport's television age, which began in the 1950s.
Go to Profile#5288
Michael Kazin
#5296
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Michael Kazin is an American historian, and professor at Georgetown University. He is co-editor of Dissent magazine. Early life Kazin was born in New York City in 1948 and was raised in Englewood, New Jersey. He is the son of literary critic Alfred Kazin, and step-son of structural engineer Mario Salvadori.
Go to Profile#5289
John Walvoord
#5297
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
John Flipse Walvoord was a Christian theologian, a pastor, and the president of Dallas Theological Seminary from 1952 to 1986. He was the author of over 30 books, focusing primarily on eschatology and theology, including The Rapture Question, and was co-editor of The Bible Knowledge Commentary with Roy B. Zuck. He earned AB and DD degrees from Wheaton College, an AM degree from Texas Christian University in philosophy, a Th.B., Th.M., and Th.D. in Systematic Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, and a Litt.D. from Liberty Baptist Seminary.
Go to Profile#5290
Khieu Samphan
#5298
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Khieu Samphan is a Cambodian former communist politician and economist who was the chairman of the state presidium of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976 until 1979. As such, he served as Cambodia's head of state and was one of the most powerful officials in the Khmer Rouge movement, although Pol Pot remained the General Secretary in the party.
Go to Profile#5291
Ilya Sutskever
#5299
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Ilya Sutskever is a computer scientist working in machine learning. He is a co-founder and Chief Scientist at OpenAI. He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning. In 2023, Sutskever and the OpenAI board fired CEO Sam Altman, who returned a week later. He is the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlexNet, a convolutional neural network. Sutskever is also one of the many co-authors of the AlphaGo paper.
Go to Profile#5292
Phill Jupitus
#5300
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Phillip Christopher Jupitus is a retired English stand-up and improv comedian, actor, performance poet, cartoonist and podcaster. Jupitus was a team captain on all but one BBC Two-broadcast episode of music quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks from its inception in 1996 until 2015, and also appears regularly as a guest on several other panel showss, including QI and BBC Radio 4's I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.
Go to Profile#5293
Valentín Fuster
#5301
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Valentín Fuster Carulla, 1st Marquess of Fuster is a Spanish cardiologist and aristocrat. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology , past President of the American Heart Association, past President of the World Heart Federation, and has been a member of the US National Academy of Medicine and Member of the European Horizon 2020 Scientific Panel of Health. In 2016 he co-chaired, with Jendayi Frazer, the Advisory Committee on The Role of the United States on Global Health.
Go to Profile#5294
William Dalrymple
#5302
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
#5295
Lucy Suchman
#5303
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Lucy Suchman is Professor Emerita of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom, also known for her work at Xerox PARC in the 1980s and 90s.
Go to Profile#5296
Jonathan H. Turner
#5304
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Jonathan H. Turner , is a professor of sociology at University of California, Riverside. Biography After receiving his PhD from Cornell University in 1968, since the academic year 1969–1970 he has been at UCR. He has been Faculty Research Lecturer at UCR, and in the profession, he has been president of the Pacific Sociological Association and California Sociological Association. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has lectured widely all over the world, and he has been a visiting professor at Cambridge University, UK, Universitat Bremen, Germany, ...
Go to Profile#5297
Lynn Nottage
#5305
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often focuses on the experience of working-class people, particularly working-class people who are Black. She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: in 2009 for her play Ruined, and in 2017 for her play Sweat. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two times.
Go to Profile#5298
Tom Banks
#5306
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Thomas Israel Banks is a theoretical physicist and professor at Rutgers University and University of California, Santa Cruz. Work Banks' work centers around string theory and its applications to high energy particle physics and cosmology. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973. In 1973-86 he was appointed at the Tel Aviv University, he was several times a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton .
Go to Profile#5299
Paul DiMaggio
#5307
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
#5300
C. Northcote Parkinson
#5308
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Cyril Northcote Parkinson was a British naval historian and author of some 60 books, the most famous of which was his best-seller Parkinson's Law , in which Parkinson advanced the eponymous law stating that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", an insight which led him to be regarded as an important scholar in public administration and management.
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