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
#5401
Robert Scheer
#5409
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Robert Scheer is an American left-wing journalist who has written for Ramparts, the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Hustler Magazine, Truthdig, Scheerpost and other publications as well as having written many books. His column for Truthdig was nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate in publications such as The Huffington Post and The Nation. He is a clinical professor of communications at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. Scheer is the former editor in-chief for the Webby Award-winning online magazine Truthdig. For many years, he co-...
Go to Profile#5402
Wendy Hall
#5410
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Dame Wendy Hall is a British computer scientist. She is Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Early life and education Wendy Hall was born in west London and educated at Ealing Grammar School for Girls. She studied for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in mathematics at the University of Southampton. She completed her Bachelor of Science degree in 1974, and her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1977. Her doctoral thesis was titled Automorphisms and coverings of Klein surfaces. She later completed a Master of Science degree in Computing at City University ...
Go to Profile#5403
Sebastian Gorka
#5411
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Sebastian Lukács Gorka is a British-born Hungarian-American media host and commentator currently affiliated with Salem Radio Network and NewsMax TV and a former government official who served briefly in the Trump administration as a Deputy Assistant to the President for seven months, from January 2017 until his termination on August 25, 2017.
Go to Profile#5404
James W. Fowler
#5412
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
James William Fowler III was an American theologian who was Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University. He was director of both the Center for Research on Faith and Moral Development, and the Center for Ethics until he retired in 2005. He was a minister in the United Methodist Church. Fowler is best known for his book Stages of Faith, published in 1981, in which he sought to develop the idea of a developmental process in "human faith".
Go to Profile#5405
Karen Spärck Jones
#5413
Overall Influence
1935 - 2007 (72 years)
Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency , a technology that underlies most modern search engines. She was an advocate for women in the field of computer science. She even came up with a slogan: “Computing is too important to be left to men.” In 2019, The New York Times published her belated obituary in its series Overlooked, calling her "a pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field." From 2008, to recog...
Go to Profile#5406
Herbert Mataré
#5414
Overall Influence
1912 - 2011 (99 years)
Herbert Franz Mataré was a German physicist. The focus of his research was the field of semiconductor research. His best-known work is the first functional European transistor, which he developed and patented together with Heinrich Welker in the vicinity of Paris in 1948, independent from the Bell Labs engineers who had developed the first transistor shortly before. The final 20 years of his life Mataré split time between his homes in Hückelhoven, Germany and Malibu, California. He was born in Aachen.
Go to Profile#5407
Leonardo DiCaprio
#5415
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio is an American actor and film producer. Known for his work in biographical and period films, he is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and three Golden Globe Awards. his films have grossed over $7.2 billion worldwide, and he has been placed eight times in annual rankings of the world's highest-paid actors.
Go to Profile#5408
Jon Stewart
#5416
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jon Stewart is an American comedian, writer, producer, director, political commentator, actor, and television host. He hosted The Daily Show, a satirical news program on Comedy Central, from 1999 to 2015 and hosted The Problem with Jon Stewart on Apple TV+. His numerous accolades include 22 Primetime Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2022.
Go to Profile#5409
Roger Mahony
#5417
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Roger Michael Mahony is an American cardinal and retired prelate of the Catholic Church who served as archbishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in California from 1985 to 2011. Before his appointment, he served as an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Fresno from 1975 to 1980 and bishop of the Diocese of Stockton from 1980 to 1985.
Go to Profile#5410
David Cross
#5418
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
David Cross is an American stand-up comedian, actor, director, and writer known for his stand-up performances, the HBO sketch comedy series Mr. Show , and his role as Tobias Fünke in the Fox/Netflix sitcom Arrested Development .
Go to Profile#5411
Felix Gers
#5419
Overall Influence
Felix Gers is a professor of computer science at Berlin University of Applied Sciences Berlin. With Jürgen Schmidhuber and Fred Cummins, he introduced the forget gate to the long short-term memory recurrent neural network architecture. This modification of the original architecture has been shown to be crucial to the success of the LSTM at such tasks as speech and handwriting recognition.
Go to Profile#5412
Ne Win
#5420
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Ne Win was a Burmese politician and military commander who served as Prime Minister of Burma from 1958 to 1960 and 1962 to 1974, and also President of Burma from 1962 to 1981. Ne Win was Burma's military dictator during the Socialist Burma period of 1962 to 1988.
Go to Profile#5413
Aung San Suu Kyi
#5421
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Aung San Suu Kyi , sometimes abbreviated to Suu Kyi, is a Burmese politician, diplomat, author, and a 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who served as State Counsellor of Myanmar and Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2016 to 2021. She has served as the general secretary of the National League for Democracy since the party's founding in 1988 and was registered as its chairperson while it was a legal party from 2011 to 2023. She played a vital role in Myanmar's transition from military junta to partial democracy in the 2010s.
Go to Profile#5414
Henry Mann
#5422
Overall Influence
1905 - 2000 (95 years)
Henry Berthold Mann was a professor of mathematics and statistics at the Ohio State University. Mann proved the Schnirelmann-Landau conjecture in number theory, and as a result earned the 1946 Cole Prize. He and his student developed the U-statistic of nonparametric statistics. Mann published the first mathematical book on the design of experiments: .
Go to Profile#5415
Alicia Keys
#5423
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Alicia Augello Cook , known professionally as Alicia Keys, is an American singer and songwriter. A classically trained pianist, Keys started composing songs when she was 12 and was signed at 15 years old by Columbia Records. After disputes with the label, she signed with Arista Records and soon released her debut album, Songs in A Minor with J Records in 2001. The album became a critical and commercial success, selling over 12 million copies worldwide. It contained the Billboard Hot 100 number-one single "Fallin'", and earned Keys an unprecedented five Grammy Awards in 2002. Her second album,...
Go to Profile#5416
Liz Smith
#5424
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Mary Elizabeth Smith was an American gossip columnist. She was known as "The Grand Dame of Dish". In the 1960s and early 1970s, she was the entertainment editor for the magazines Cosmopolitan and Sports Illustrated. Between 1976 and 2009, she wrote a self-titled gossip column for newspapers including New York Newsday, the New York Daily News and the New York Post that was syndicated in 60 to 70 other newspapers. On television, she appeared on Fox, E!, and WNBC.
Go to Profile#5417
Erwin Kreyszig
#5425
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Erwin Otto Kreyszig was a German Canadian applied mathematician and the Professor of Mathematics at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He was a pioneer in the field of applied mathematics: non-wave replicating linear systems. He was also a distinguished author, having written the textbook Advanced Engineering Mathematics, the leading textbook for civil, mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering undergraduate engineering mathematics.
Go to Profile#5418
Brian Stableford
#5426
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Brian Michael Stableford is a British academic, critic and science fiction writer who has published more than 70 novels. His earlier books were published under the name Brian M. Stableford, but more recent ones have dropped the middle initial and appeared under the name Brian Stableford. He has also used the pseudonym Brian Craig for some of his very early and late works. The pseudonym derives from the first names of himself and of a school friend from the 1960s, Craig A. Mackintosh, with whom he jointly published some very early work.
Go to Profile#5419
Vincent F. Hendricks
#5427
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Vincent Fella Rune Møller Hendricks is a Danish philosopher and logician. He holds a doctoral degree and a habilitation in philosophy and is Professor of Formal Philosophy and Director of the Center for Information and Bubble Studies at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He was previously Professor of Formal Philosophy at Roskilde University, Denmark. He is member of IIP, the Institut International de Philosophie in Paris.
Go to Profile#5420
J. P. Moreland
#5428
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
James Porter Moreland , better known as J. P. Moreland, is an American philosopher, theologian, and Christian apologist. He currently serves as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California.
Go to Profile#5421
Dmitry Fuchs
#5429
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Dmitry Borisovich Fuchs is a Russian-American mathematician, specializing in the representation theory of infinite-dimensional Lie groups and in topology. Education and career Fuchs received in 1964 his Russian candidate degree under Albert S. Schwarz at Moscow State University, where he taught thereafter. Schwarz conducted a seminar on algebraic topology with Mikhail Postnikov and Vladimir Boltyanski. Fuchs participated in the seminar and, as a student, published papers with Schwarz, as did Askold Ivanovich Vinogradov a few years earlier. Fuchs received his Russian doctorate in 1987 at Tbilisi State University.
Go to Profile#5422
Benjamin List
#5430
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Benjamin List is a German chemist who is one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research and professor of organic chemistry at the University of Cologne. He co-developed organocatalysis, a method of accelerating chemical reactions and making them more efficient. He shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David MacMillan "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis".
Go to Profile#5423
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
#5431
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Biography Bueno de Mesquita graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1963, , earned his BA degree from Queens College, New York in 1967 and then his MA and PhD from the University of Michigan. He specializes in international relations, foreign policy, and nation building. He is one of the originators of selectorate theory, and was also the director of New York University's Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy from 2006 to 2016.
Go to Profile#5424
Lewis Thomas
#5432
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Lewis Thomas was an American physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher. Life and career Thomas was born in Flushing, New York and attended Princeton University and Harvard Medical School. He became Dean of Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine, and President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute. His formative years as an independent medical researcher were at Tulane University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#5425
Taher Elgamal
#5433
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Taher Elgamal is an Egyptian cryptographer and entrepreneur. He has served as the Chief Technology Officer of Security at Salesforce since 2013. Prior to that, he was the founder and CEO of Securify and the director of engineering at RSA Security. From 1995 to 1998, he was the chief scientist at Netscape Communications. He has been described as the "father of SSL" for the work he did in computer security while working at Netscape, which helped in establishing a private and secure communications on the Internet.
Go to Profile#5426
James Callaghan
#5434
Overall Influence
1912 - 2005 (93 years)
Leonard James Callaghan, Baron Callaghan of Cardiff, , commonly known as Jim Callaghan, was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1976 to 1979 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1976 to 1980. Callaghan is the only person to have held all four Great Offices of State, having served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1964 to 1967, Home Secretary from 1967 to 1970 and Foreign Secretary from 1974 to 1976. He was a Member of Parliament from 1945 to 1987.
Go to Profile#5427
Leonidas J. Guibas
#5435
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Leonidas John Guibas is the Paul Pigott Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He heads the Geometric Computation group in the Computer Science Department. Guibas obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1976. That same year, he was program chair for the ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry in 1996. In 2017 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Guibas is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and was awarded the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award for 2007 "for his pioneering contributions in applying algorithms to a wide range of computer science disciplines." In 2018 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#5428
Abner Shimony
#5436
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Abner Eliezer Shimony was an American physicist and philosopher. He specialized in quantum theory and philosophy of science. As a physicist, he concentrated on the interaction between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. He authored many works and research on complementarity in quantum entanglement as well as multiparticle quantum interferometry, both relating to quantum coherence. He authored research articles and books on the foundations of quantum mechanics. He received the 1996 Lakatos Prize for his work in philosophy of science. Shimony is also the author of Tibaldo and the Hole in ...
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Irene Pepperberg
#5437
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Irene Maxine Pepperberg is an American scientist noted for her studies in animal cognition, particularly in relation to parrots. She has been a professor, researcher and/or lecturer at multiple universities, and she is currently a research associate and lecturer at Harvard University. Pepperberg also serves on the Advisory Council of METI . She is well known for her comparative studies into the cognitive fundamentals of language and communication, and she was one of the first to work on language learning in animals other than human species , by extension to a bird species. Pepperberg is als...
Go to Profile#5430
John Sinclair
#5438
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
John Sinclair is an American poet, writer, and political activist from Flint, Michigan. Sinclair's defining style is jazz poetry, and he has released most of his works in audio formats. Most of his pieces include musical accompaniment, usually by a varying group of collaborators dubbed Blues Scholars.
Go to Profile#5431
Harry V. Jaffa
#5439
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Harry Victor Jaffa was an American political philosopher, historian, columnist, and professor. He was a professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont Graduate University, and was a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute. Robert P. Kraynak says his "life work was to develop an American application of Leo Strauss's revival of natural-right philosophy against the relativism and nihilism of our times".
Go to Profile#5432
Karl Deisseroth
#5440
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Karl Alexander Deisseroth is an American scientist. He is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. He is known for creating and developing the technologies of hydrogel-tissue chemistry and optogenetics, and for applying integrated optical and genetic strategies to study normal neural circuit function, as well as dysfunction in neurological and psychiatric disease.
Go to Profile#5433
David D. Cole
#5441
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
#5434
David Donoho
#5442
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David Leigh Donoho is an American statistician. He is a professor of statistics at Stanford University, where he is also the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the Humanities and Sciences. His work includes the development of effective methods for the construction of low-dimensional representations for high-dimensional data problems , development of wavelets for denoising and compressed sensing. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
Go to Profile#5435
Sam Francis
#5443
Overall Influence
1923 - 1994 (71 years)
Samuel Lewis Francis was an American painter and printmaker. Early life Sam Francis was born in San Mateo, California, the son of Katherine Lewis Francis and Samuel Augustus Francis Sr. The death of his mother in 1935, who had encouraged his interest in music affected him deeply, but he later developed a strong bond with his stepmother, Virginia Peterson Francis. He attended San Mateo High School in the early 1940s.
Go to Profile#5436
Chris Bonington
#5444
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Sir Christian John Storey Bonington, CVO, CBE, DL is a British mountaineer. His career has included nineteen expeditions to the Himalayas, including four to Mount Everest. Early life and expeditions Bonington's father, who left the family when Christian was nine months old, was a founding member of L Detachment, Special Air Service. Bonington first began climbing in 1951 at age 16. Educated at University College School in Hampstead, Bonington joined the Royal Fusiliers before attending Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and on graduation was commissioned in the Royal Tank Regiment in 1956. Af...
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Koichi Tanaka
#5445
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Koichi Tanaka is a Japanese electrical engineer who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for developing a novel method for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules with John Bennett Fenn and Kurt Wüthrich .
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Sheila Fitzpatrick
#5446
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Sheila Mary Fitzpatrick is an Australian historian, whose main subjects are history of the Soviet Union and history of modern Russia, especially the Stalin era and the Great Purges, of which she proposes a "history from below", and is part of the "revisionist school" of Communist historiography. She has also critically reviewed the concept of totalitarianism and highlighted the differences between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in debates about comparison of Nazism and Stalinism.
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Melanie Joy
#5447
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Melanie Joy is an American social psychologist and author, primarily notable for coining and promulgating the term carnism. She is the founding president of nonprofit advocacy group Beyond Carnism, previously known as Carnism Awareness & Action Network , as well as a former professor of psychology and sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has published the books Strategic Action for Animals, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows and Beyond Beliefs.
Go to Profile#5440
Ralph E. Gomory
#5448
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Ralph Edward Gomory is an American applied mathematician and executive. Gomory worked at IBM as a researcher and later as an executive. During that time, his research led to the creation of new areas of applied mathematics.
Go to Profile#5441
Diane Ravitch
#5449
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Diane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. In 2010, she became "an activist on behalf of public schools". Her blog at DianeRavitch.net has received more than 36 million page views since she began blogging in 2012. Ravitch writes for the New York Review of Books.
Go to Profile#5442
Grote Reber
#5450
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Grote Reber was an American pioneer of radio astronomy, which combined his interests in amateur radio and amateur astronomy. He was instrumental in investigating and extending Karl Jansky's pioneering work and conducted the first sky survey in the radio frequencies.
Go to Profile#5443
J. Arch Getty
#5451
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John Archibald Getty III is an American historian and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles , who specializes in the history of Russia and the history of the Soviet Union. Life and career Getty was born in Louisiana and grew up in Oklahoma. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and his Ph.D. from Boston College in 1979. Getty was a professor at the University of California, Riverside, before he moved to UCLA.
Go to Profile#5444
Tomáš Berdych
#5452
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Tomáš Berdych is a Czech former professional tennis player. His most notable achievement was reaching the final of the 2010 Wimbledon Championships, completing consecutive upsets in the defeat of top seed and six-time champion Roger Federer in the quarterfinals, and of No. 3 Novak Djokovic in the semifinals. In the final, he lost to Rafael Nadal in straight sets. Berdych's biggest career title was the Paris Masters in 2005 as an unseeded player, defeating Ivan Ljubičić in the final. Berdych has reached the semifinals of all four Grand Slams. Alongside his Wimbledon performance in the same yea...
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Solomon Marcus
#5453
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Solomon Marcus was a Romanian mathematician, member of the Mathematical Section of the Romanian Academy and emeritus professor of the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Mathematics. His main research was in the fields of mathematical analysis, mathematical and computational linguistics and computer science. He also published numerous papers on various cultural topics: poetics, linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, and history of science and education.
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Jörg Baten
#5454
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Jörg Baten is a German economic historian. He is the former President of the European Historical Economics Society, current co-Editor-in-chief of Economics and Human Biology and is currently a professor of economic history at the University of Tübingen.
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Patricia Jacobs
#5455
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Patricia Ann Jacobs OBE FRSE FRS FMedSci FRCPath is a Scottish geneticist and is Honorary Professor of Human Genetics, Co-director of Research, Wessex Regional Genetics Laboratory, within the University of Southampton.
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Douglas Diamond
#5456
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Douglas Warren Diamond is an American economist. He is currently the Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he has taught since 1979. Diamond specializes in the study of financial intermediaries, financial crises, and liquidity. He is a former president of the American Finance Association and the Western Finance Association .
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Michael Apple
#5457
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Michael W. Apple is an educational theorist specialized on education and power, cultural politics, curriculum theory and research, critical teaching, and the development of democratic schools. Apple is John Bascom Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education, where he taught from 1970-2018. Prior to completing his Ed.D. at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1970, Apple taught in elementary and secondary schools in New Jersey, where he grew up, as well as served as the president of his teachers' union.
Go to Profile#5450
Michael A. Arbib
#5458
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Michael Anthony Arbib is an American computational neuroscientist. He is an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of California at San Diego and professor emeritus at the University of Southern California; before his 2016 retirement he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of computer science, as well as a professor of biological sciences, biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, neuroscience and psychology.
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