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).

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Ranking

List of the most influential people

#5351

Charles Caldwell Ryrie

#5359

Overall Influence

1925 - 2016 (91 years)

Charles Caldwell Ryrie was an American Bible scholar and Christian theologian. He served as professor of systematic theology and dean of doctoral studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and as president and professor at what is now Cairn University. After his retirement from Dallas Theological Seminary he also taught courses for Tyndale Theological Seminary. He is considered one of the most influential American theologians of the 20th century. He was the editor of The Ryrie Study Bible by Moody Publishers, containing more than 10,000 of Ryrie's explanatory notes. First published in 1978, it has sold more than 2 million copies.

#5352

Jay McInerney

#5360

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

John Barrett "Jay" McInerney Jr. is an American novelist, screenwriter, editor, and columnist. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, and The Last of the Savages. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote the screenplay for the television film Gia, which starred Angelina Jolie. He was the wine columnist for House & Garden magazine, and his essays on wine have been collected in Bacchus & Me and A Hedonist in the Cellar . His most recent novel is titled Bright, Precious Days, published in 2016.

#5353

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

#5361

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Maria Gloria Macaraeg Macapagal Arroyo , often referred to by her initials PGMA and GMA, is a Filipino academic and politician who previously served as the 14th president of the Philippines from 2001 to 2010. She was serving in the congress as a Deputy Speaker from 2022 until her removal in November 2023. She is the longest serving president of the Philippines since Ferdinand Marcos. Before her accession to the presidency, she served as the 10th vice president of the Philippines from 1998 to 2001 under President Joseph Estrada, making her the country's first female vice president, despite having run on an opposing ticket.

#5354

George Sperling

#5362

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

George Sperling is an American cognitive psychologist, researcher, and educator. Sperling documented the existence of iconic memory . Through several experiments, he showed support for his hypothesis that human beings store a perfect image of the visual world for a brief moment, before it is discarded from memory. He was in the forefront in wanting to help the deaf population in terms of speech recognition. He argued that the telephone was created originally for the hearing impaired but it became popularized by the hearing community. He suggested with a sevenfold reduction in the bandwidth for video transmission, it can be useful for the improvement in American Sign Language communication.

#5355

Edward Bond

#5363

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Edward Bond is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of some fifty plays, among them Saved , the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK. Other well-received works include Narrow Road to the Deep North , Lear , The Sea , The Fool , Restoration , and the War trilogy . Bond is broadly considered among the major living dramatists but he has always been and remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and ...

#5356

Robert K. Yin

#5364

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Robert K. Yin is an American social scientist and President of COSMOS Corporation, known for his work on case study research as well as on qualitative research. Over the years, his work on case study research has been frequently cited. Google Scholar listed it as the second most cited methodological work, qualitative or quantitative, over a 20-year period

#5357

Herbie Hancock

#5365

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Herbert Jeffrey Hancock is an American jazz musician, bandleader, and composer. Hancock started his career with trumpeter Donald Byrd's group. He shortly thereafter joined the Miles Davis Quintet, where he helped to redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section and was one of the primary architects of the post-bop sound. In the 1970s, Hancock experimented with jazz fusion, funk, and electro styles, using a wide array of synthesizers and electronics. It was during this period that he released perhaps his best-known and most influential album, Head Hunters.

#5358

Kendrick Lamar

#5366

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (39 years)

Kendrick Lamar Duckworth is an American rapper and singer-songwriter. Known for his cinematic storytelling, melodic cadences, and artistic reinventions, he is regarded as one of the most influential artists of his generation, earning him the nickname "King Kendrick". He was named the second-greatest rapper of all time by Billboard and Vibe in 2023.

#5359

Herman Wold

#5367

Overall Influence

1908 - 1992 (84 years)

Herman Ole Andreas Wold was a Norwegian-born econometrician and statistician who had a long career in Sweden. Wold was known for his work in mathematical economics, in time series analysis, and in econometric statistics.

#5360

Jack B. Weinstein

Jack B. Weinstein

#5368

Overall Influence

1921 - 2021 (100 years)

Jack Bertrand Weinstein was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Until his entry into inactive senior status on February 10, 2020, he maintained a full docket of cases.

#5361

Marcia Langton

#5369

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Marcia Lynne Langton is an Aboriginal Australian writer and academic. she is the Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. Langton is known for her activism in the Indigenous rights arena.

#5362

Philippe Aghion

#5370

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Philippe Mario Aghion is a French economist who is a professor at the , at INSEAD, and at the London School of Economics. He also teaches at the Paris School of Economics. From 2002 to 2015, he was the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Prior to that, he was a professor at University College London, an Official Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#5363

Robert R. Redfield

Robert R. Redfield

#5371

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Robert Ray Redfield Jr. is an American virologist who served as the Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry from 2018 to 2021.

#5364

Chris Kimsey

#5372

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Christopher Kenneth Kimsey is an English record producer, mixer and musician most famous for having co-produced The Rolling Stones' Undercover and Steel Wheels albums. He was also an engineer on their 1971 album Sticky Fingers as well as 1978's Some Girls and 1980's Emotional Rescue and assisted Mick Jagger and Keith Richards closely in preparing 1981's Tattoo You. He was the engineer and associate producer for both Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You.

#5365

Paul Finkelman

#5373

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Paul Finkelman is an American legal historian. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books on American legal and constitutional history, slavery, general American history and baseball. In addition, he has authored more than 200 scholarly articles on these and many other subjects. From 2017 - 2022, Finkelman served as the President and Chancellor of Gratz College, Melrose Park, Pennsylvania .

#5366

John Kerr

#5374

Overall Influence

1914 - 1991 (77 years)

Sir John Robert Kerr, was an Australian barrister and judge who served as the 18th governor-general of Australia, in office from 1974 to 1977. He is primarily known for his involvement in the 1975 constitutional crisis, which culminated in his decision to dismiss the incumbent prime minister Gough Whitlam and appoint Malcolm Fraser as his replacement, unprecedented actions in Australian federal politics.

#5367

Jack Dennis

#5375

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Jack Bonnell Dennis is a computer scientist and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The work of Dennis in computer systems and computer languages is recognized to have played a key role in hacker culture. As a Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty member he sponsored easier access to computer facilities at MIT during the early development of the subculture. Much of what would later become Unix came from his early collaboration with Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. This collaborative and open philosophy lives on today.

#5368

Dean Ornish

#5376

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Dean Michael Ornish is an American physician and researcher. He is the president and founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, and a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The author of Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease, Eat More, Weigh Less and The Spectrum, he is an advocate for using diet and lifestyle changes to treat and prevent heart disease.

#5369

Jerry Brown

#5377

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. is an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as the 34th and 39th governor of California from 1975 to 1983 and 2011 to 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, he was elected Secretary of State of California in 1970; Brown later served as Mayor of Oakland from 1999 to 2007 and Attorney General of California from 2007 to 2011. He was both the oldest and sixth-youngest governor of California due to the 28-year gap between his second and third terms. Upon completing his fourth term in office, Brown became the fourth longest-serving governor in U.S. history, ser...

#5370

Igor Frenkel

#5378

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Igor Borisovich Frenkel is a Russian-American mathematician at Yale University working in representation theory and mathematical physics. Frenkel emigrated to the United States in 1979. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1980 with a dissertation on the "Orbital Theory for Affine Lie Algebras". He held positions at the IAS and MSRI, and a tenured professorship at Rutgers University, before taking his current job of tenured professor at Yale University. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#5371

Harold Hongju Koh

#5379

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Harold Hongju Koh is an American legal scholar who served as the legal adviser of the Department of State in the Obama administration. He was nominated to this position by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2009, and confirmed by the Senate on June 25, 2009. He left the State Department in January 2013, returning to Yale University as a Sterling Professor of international law. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007.

#5372

Simon Johnson

#5380

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Simon H. Johnson is a British American economist. He is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He has held a wide variety of academic and policy-related positions, including professor of economics at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, he was Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund.

#5373

Peter Breggin

#5381

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Peter Roger Breggin is an American psychiatrist and critic of shock treatment and psychiatric medication and COVID-19 response. In his books, he advocates replacing psychiatry's use of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy with psychotherapy, education, empathy, love, and broader human services.

#5374

Daniel Clowes

#5382

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Daniel Gillespie Clowes is an American cartoonist, graphic novelist, illustrator, and screenwriter. Most of Clowes's work first appeared in Eightball, a solo anthology comic book series. An Eightball issue typically contained several short pieces and a chapter of a longer narrative that was later collected and published as a graphic novel, such as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron , Ghost World , David Boring and Patience . Clowes's illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, Newsweek, Vogue, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. With filmmaker Terry Zwigoff, Clowes adapted Ghost World into a 2001 film and another Eightball story into the 2006 film, Art School Confidential.

#5375

Elizabeth Spelke

Elizabeth Spelke

#5383

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Elizabeth Shilin Spelke FBA is an American cognitive psychologist at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University and director of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Starting in the 1980s, she carried out experiments on infants and young children to test their cognitive faculties. She has suggested that human beings have a large array of innate mental abilities. In recent years, she has made important contributions to the debate on cognitive differences between men and women. She defends the position that there is no scientific evidence of any significant disparity in the intellec...

#5376

Maurizio Ferraris

Maurizio Ferraris

#5384

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Maurizio Ferraris is an Italian continental philosopher and scholar, whose name is associated especially with the philosophical current named "new realism"—Ferraris wrote the Manifesto of New Realism in 2012, which was published by SUNY Press in 2014

#5377

Franklin Graham

Franklin Graham

#5385

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

William Franklin Graham III is an American evangelical evangelist and missionary. He frequently engages in Christian revival tours and political commentary. He is president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and of Samaritan's Purse, an international Christian relief organization. Graham became a "committed Christian" in 1974 and was ordained in 1982, and has since become a public speaker and author. He is a son of the American evangelist Billy Graham.

#5378

Peter Benjamin Golden

Peter Benjamin Golden

#5386

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Peter Benjamin Golden is an American historian who is "professor emeritus" of History, Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University. He has written many books and articles on Turkic and Central Asian studies, such as An introduction to the history of the Turkic peoples.

#5379

Samuel Bowles

#5387

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

#5380

P. J. Plauger

#5388

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Phillip James Plauger is an author, entrepreneur and computer programmer. He has written and co-written articles and books about programming style, software tools, and the C programming language, as well as works of science fiction.

#5381

Martha Finnemore

#5389

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Martha Finnemore is an American constructivist scholar of international relations, and University Professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. She is considered among the most influential international relations scholars. Her scholarship has highlighted the role of norms and culture in international politics, as well as shown that international organizations are consequential and purposive social agents in world politics that can shape state interests.

#5382

Teresa de Lauretis

Teresa de Lauretis

#5390

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian author and Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her areas of interest include semiotics, psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, feminism, women's studies, lesbian- and queer studies. She has also written on science fiction. Fluent in English and Italian, she writes in both languages. Additionally, her work has been translated into sixteen other languages.

#5383

George E. Collins

#5391

Overall Influence

1928 - 2017 (89 years)

George E. Collins was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is the inventor of garbage collection by reference counting and of the method of quantifier elimination by cylindrical algebraic decomposition.

#5384

Leo Breiman

#5392

Overall Influence

1928 - 2005 (77 years)

Leo Breiman was a distinguished statistician at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, and was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

#5385

Martha Chase

#5393

Overall Influence

1927 - 2003 (76 years)

Martha Cowles Chase , also known as Martha C. Epstein, was an American geneticist who in 1952, with Alfred Hershey, experimentally helped to confirm that DNA rather than protein is the genetic material of life.

#5386

Ernesto Sabato

#5394

Overall Influence

1911 - 2011 (100 years)

Ernesto Sabato was an Argentine novelist, essayist, painter, and physicist. According to the BBC he "won some of the most prestigious prizes in Hispanic literature" and "became very influential in the literary world throughout Latin America". Upon his death El País dubbed him the "last classic writer in Argentine literature".

#5387

Alison Gopnik

#5395

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Alison Gopnik is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others. Her body of work also includes four books and over 100 journal article...

#5388

Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner

#5396

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Daniel W. Drezner is an American political scientist. He is known for his scholarship and commentary on International Relations and International Political Economy. He is professor of international politics at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution.

#5389

Nicholas Dirks

#5397

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Nicholas B. Dirks is an American academic and the former Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. Dirks is the author of numerous books on South Asian history and culture, primarily concerned with the impact of British colonial rule. In June 2020, Dirks was named president and CEO of The New York Academy of Sciences.

#5390

Barney Hoskyns

#5398

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Barney Hoskyns is a British music critic and editorial director of the online music journalism archive Rock's Backpages. Biography Hoskyns graduated from Oxford with a first class degree in English. He began writing about music for Melody Maker and New Musical Express, quitting his job as staff writer at NME to research a book about soul music. The result was Say It One Time For The Brokenhearted . He went on to write more than fifteen books on musicians and music history.

#5391

Abram Bergson

#5399

Overall Influence

1914 - 2003 (89 years)

Abram Bergson was an American economist, academician, and professor in the Harvard Economics Department since 1956. Early life and education He graduated with an A.B. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1933 and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1935 and 1940, respectively.

#5392

Anne Waldman

#5400

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outriders Poetry Project experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat Generation poets.

#5393

Terry Gilliam

#5401

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Terrence Vance Gilliam is a British filmmaker, comedian, animator and actor. He gained stardom as a member of the Monty Python comedy troupe alongside John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Graham Chapman. Together they collaborated on the sketch series Monty Python's Flying Circus and the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail , Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life . In 1988, they received the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema.

#5394

Mark Blaug

#5402

Overall Influence

1927 - 2011 (84 years)

Mark Blaug FBA was a Dutch-born British economist , who covered a broad range of topics during his long career. He was married to Ruth Towse. Life and work Blaug was born on 3 April 1927 in The Hague as Norbert Blauaug. In 1955 Blaug received his PhD from Columbia University in New York under the supervision of George Stigler. Besides shorter periods in public service and in international organisations he has held academic appointments in – among others – Yale University, the University of London, the London School of Economics, the University of Exeter and the University of Buckingham. He wa...

#5395

Eugene Braunwald

Eugene Braunwald

#5403

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Eugene Braunwald is an Austrian-born American cardiologist. Early life Braunwald was born to Jewish parents Wilhelm Braunwald and Clara Wallach in Vienna. He obtained his A.B. and M.D. at New York University, then completed his residency in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

#5396

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson

#5404

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Jeanette Winterson is an English author. Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against convention. Other novels explore gender polarities and sexual identity and later ones the relations between humans and technology. She broadcasts and teaches creative writing. She has won a Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the St. Louis Literary Award, and the Lambda Literary Award twice. She has received an Officer of the Order of t...

#5397

Henri Wittmann

#5405

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Henri Wittmann is a Canadian linguist from Quebec. He is best known for his work on Quebec French. Biography Henri Wittmann was born in Alsace in 1937. After studying with André Martinet at the Sorbonne, he moved to North America and taught successively at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Alberta in Edmonton, the University of Windsor and McGill University in Montreal before teaching in the French university system of Quebec, the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and at Rimouski as well as the Université de Sherbrooke. He retired from teaching in 1997, after an extensive tour of teaching and conferencing in France.

#5398

M. F. Husain

#5406

Overall Influence

1915 - 2011 (96 years)

Maqbool Fida Husain was an Indian artist known for executing bold, vibrantly coloured narrative paintings in a modified Cubist style. He was one of the most celebrated and internationally recognised Indian artists of the 20th century. He was one of the founding members of Bombay Progressive Artists' Group. M.F. Husain is associated with Indian modernism in the 1940s. His early association with the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group used modern technique, and was inspired by the "new" India after the partition of 1947. His narrative paintings, executed in a modified Cubist style, can be caustic and funny as well as serious and sombre.

#5399

Gilbert Stork

#5407

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

Gilbert Stork was an organic chemist. For a quarter of a century he was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Columbia University. He is known for making significant contributions to the total synthesis of natural products, including a lifelong fascination with the synthesis of quinine. In so doing he also made a number of contributions to mechanistic understanding of reactions, and performed pioneering work on enamine chemistry, leading to development of the Stork enamine alkylation. It is believed he was responsible for the first planned stereocontrolled synthesis as well as...

#5400

Michael Rothschild

#5408

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Michael Rothschild is an American economist; he is visiting professor at the Department of Economics of the University of California in Los Angeles and a former dean at Princeton. Education Rothschild holds a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology from Reed College , and a Master of Arts in international relations from Yale University . He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

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