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
#551
William Thurston
#551
Overall Influence
1946 - 2012 (66 years)
William Paul Thurston was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds.
Go to Profile#552
Ward Cunningham
#552
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Howard G. Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki and was a co-author of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. A pioneer in both design patterns and extreme programming, he started coding the WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and installed it on c2.com on March 25, 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository. He co-authored a book about wikis, entitled The Wiki Way, and invented the Framework for Integrated Test.
Go to Profile#553
Paul Davies
#553
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Paul Charles William Davies is an English physicist, writer and broadcaster, a professor in Arizona State University and director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. He is affiliated with the Institute for Quantum Studies in Chapman University in California. He previously held academic appointments in the University of Cambridge, University College London, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, University of Adelaide and Macquarie University. His research interests are in the fields of cosmology, quantum field theory, and astrobiology.
Go to Profile#554
Clark Kerr
#554
Overall Influence
1911 - 2003 (92 years)
Clark Kerr was an American economist and academic administrator. He was the first chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and twelfth president of the University of California. Early life and education Kerr was born in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania, to Samuel William and Caroline Kerr. He was raised on rural farms outside of Reading, Pennsylvania, first in the Stony Creek area and then in the Oley Valley after age 10. Even after Kerr became one of the most prominent academic administrators of his generation, he always regarded himself as a "Pennsylvania farm boy" and expressed fru...
Go to Profile#555
Emmanuelle Charpentier
#555
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Areas of Specialization: Microbiology, Genetics Emmanuelle Charpentier is the Founding and Acting Director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens and an Honorary Professor at Humboldt University of Berlin. She completed her undergraduate studies at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, which is now known as the Faculty of Science at Sorbonne University. She went on to earn a research doctorate from the Institut Pasteur. Charpentier is well known for her collaboration with Jennifer Doudna on decoding the molecular mechanisms of the CRISPR/Cas9 bacterial immune system. Her work on CRISPR has enabled scientists to edit the genome using Cas9.
Go to Profile#556
Kenneth Waltz
#556
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Kenneth Neal Waltz was an American political scientist who was a member of the faculty at both the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University and one of the most prominent scholars in the field of international relations. He was a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War.
Go to Profile#557
John Tooby
#557
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
John Tooby was an American anthropologist, who helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology with his psychologist wife Leda Cosmides. Biography Tooby received his PhD in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University in 1989 and was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara .
Go to Profile#558
Jean Tirole
#558
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jean Tirole is a French professor of economics at Toulouse 1 Capitole University. He focuses on industrial organization, game theory, banking and finance, and psychology. Especially he focused on regulation of economics where he wants that it will not hinder the innovation and it will keeps a fair rules.
Go to Profile#559
Douglass North
#559
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Douglass Cecil North was an American economist known for his work in economic history. Along with Robert Fogel, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993. In the words of the Nobel Committee, North and Fogel "renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change."
Go to Profile#560
Carol Gilligan
#560
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Carol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships. Gilligan is a professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. She is known for her book In a Different Voice , which criticized Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.
Go to Profile#561
Khalifa Haftar
#561
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Omar Haftar is a Libyan politician, military officer, and the commander of the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army . On 2 March 2015, he was appointed commander of the armed forces loyal to the elected legislative body, the Libyan House of Representatives.
Go to Profile#562
Barry Boehm
#562
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Barry William Boehm was an American software engineer, distinguished professor of computer science, industrial and systems engineering; the TRW Professor of Software Engineering; and founding director of the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at the University of Southern California. He was known for his many contributions to the area of software engineering.
Go to Profile#563
Diane Sawyer
#563
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Lila Diane Sawyer is an American television broadcast journalist known for anchoring major programs on two networks including ABC World News Tonight, Good Morning America, 20/20, and Primetime newsmagazine while at ABC News. During her tenure at CBS News she hosted CBS Morning and was the first woman correspondent on 60 Minutes. Prior to her journalism career, she was a member of U.S. President Richard Nixon's White House staff and assisted in his post-presidency memoirs. Presently she works for ABC News producing documentaries and interview specials.
Go to Profile#564
Anna Schwartz
#564
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Anna Jacobson Schwartz was an American economist who worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City and a writer for The New York Times. Paul Krugman has said that Schwartz is "one of the world's greatest monetary scholars."
Go to Profile#565
David Rumelhart
#565
Overall Influence
1942 - 2011 (69 years)
David Everett Rumelhart was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artificial intelligence, and parallel distributed processing. He also admired formal linguistic approaches to cognition, and explored the possibility of formulating a formal grammar to capture the structure of stories.
Go to Profile#566
Bertrand Meyer
#566
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bertrand Meyer is a French academic, author, and consultant in the field of computer languages. He created the Eiffel programming language and the idea of design by contract. Education and academic career Meyer received a master's degree in engineering from the École Polytechnique in Paris, a second master's degree from Stanford University, and a PhD from the Université de Nancy. He had a technical and managerial career for nine years at Électricité de France, and for three years was a member of the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Go to Profile#567
Banksy
#567
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist and film director whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. Active since the 1990s, his satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have appeared on streets, walls and bridges throughout the world. Banksy's work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. Banksy says that he was inspired by 3D, a gra...
Go to Profile#568
Richard A. Clarke
#568
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard Alan Clarke is an American national security expert, novelist, and former government official. He served as the Counterterrorism Czar for the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-Terrorism for the United States between 1998 and 2003.
Go to Profile#569
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
#569
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum , sometimes referred to by the handle ast, is an American–Dutch computer scientist and professor emeritus of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Go to Profile#570
Masatoshi Shima
#570
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Masatoshi Shima is a Japanese electronics engineer. He was one of the architects of the world's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. In 1968, Shima worked for Busicom in Japan, and did the logic design for a specialized CPU to be translated into three-chip custom chips. In 1969, he worked with Intel's Ted Hoff and Stanley Mazor to reduce the three-chip Busicom proposal into a one-chip architecture. In 1970, that architecture was transformed into a silicon chip, the Intel 4004, by Federico Faggin, with Shima's assistance in logic design.
Go to Profile#571
François Jacob
#571
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
François Jacob was a French biologist who, together with Jacques Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cellss occurs through regulation of transcription. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff.
Go to Profile#572
Raoul Bott
#572
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Raoul Bott was a Hungarian-American mathematician known for numerous foundational contributions to geometry in its broad sense. He is best known for his Bott periodicity theorem, the Morse–Bott functions which he used in this context, and the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem.
Go to Profile#573
Aleksandr Dugin
#573
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin is a Russian far-right political philosopher. Born into a military intelligence family, Dugin was an anti-communist dissident during the 1980s. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dugin co-founded the National Bolshevik Party with Eduard Limonov, a party which espoused National Bolshevism, which he later left. In 1997, he published Foundations of Geopolitics, in which he outlined his worldview, calling for Russia to rebuild its influence through alliances and conquest, and to challenge the rival Atlanticist empire led by the United States. Dugin continued ...
Go to Profile#574
Jean Charest
#574
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
John James "Jean" Charest is a Canadian lawyer and former politician who served as the 29th premier of Quebec from 2003 to 2012 and the fifth deputy prime minister of Canada in 1993. Charest was elected to the House of Commons in 1984 and would serve in several federal cabinet positions between 1986 and 1993. He became the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1993 and remained in the role until he entered provincial politics in 1998. Charest was elected as the leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, and his party went on to form government in 2003.
Go to Profile#575
Richard Swinburne
#575
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Richard Granville Swinburne is an English philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years, Swinburne has been a proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. He aroused much discussion with his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason.
Go to Profile#576
Martin Wolf
#576
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Martin Harry Wolf is a British journalist who focuses on economics. He is the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. Early life Wolf was born in London, in 1946. His father Edmund was an Austrian Jewishish playwright who migrated from Vienna to England before World War II. In London, Edmund met Wolf's mother, a Dutch Jew who had lost nearly thirty close relatives in the Holocaust. Wolf recalls that his background left him wary of political extremes and encouraged his interest in economics, as he felt economic policy mistakes were one of the root causes of World War II. He was...
Go to Profile#577
Valentina Tereshkova
#577
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova is a Russian engineer, member of the State Duma, and former Soviet cosmonaut, being the first woman ever to fly in space. She was the first woman in space, having flown a solo mission on Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963. She orbited the Earth 48 times, spent almost three days in space, is the only woman to have been on a solo space mission and is the last surviving Vostok programme cosmonaut. She was the youngest woman to fly in space until 2023 when Anastatia Mayers flew on Galactic 02 at the age of 18. Since Mayers flew a suborbital mission, Tereshkova remains the ...
Go to Profile#578
Bernard Stiegler
#578
Overall Influence
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
Bernard Stiegler was a French philosopher. He was head of the Institut de recherche et d'innovation , which he founded in 2006 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou. He was also the founder in 2005 of the political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis; the founder in 2010 of the philosophy school, pharmakon.fr, held at Épineuil-le-Fleuriel; and a co-founder in 2018 of Collectif Internation, a group of "politicised researchers" His best known work is Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus.
Go to Profile#579
Amos Tversky
#579
Overall Influence
1937 - 1996 (59 years)
Amos Nathan Tversky was an Israeli cognitive and mathematical psychologist and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk. Much of his early work concerned the foundations of measurement. He was co-author of a three-volume treatise, Foundations of Measurement. His early work with Daniel Kahneman focused on the psychology of prediction and probability judgment; later they worked together to develop prospect theory, which aims to explain irrational human economic choices and is considered one of the seminal works of behavioral economics.
Go to Profile#580
Dorothy Hodgkin
#580
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin was a Nobel Prize-winning British chemist who advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of biomolecules, which became essential for structural biology.
Go to Profile#581
John Hopfield
#581
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
John Joseph Hopfield is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the Hopfield network. Biography Hopfield was born in 1933 to Polish physicist John Joseph Hopfield and physicist Helen Hopfield. Helen was the older Hopfield's second wife. He is the sixth of Hopfield's children and has three children and six grandchildren of his own.
Go to Profile#582
Jonas Savimbi
#582
Overall Influence
1934 - 2002 (68 years)
Jonas Malheiro Savimbi was an Angolan revolutionary, politician, and rebel military leader who founded and led the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola . UNITA waged a guerrilla war against Portuguese colonial rule from 1966 to 1974, then confronted the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola during the Angolan Civil War. Savimbi was killed in a clash with government troops in 2002.
Go to Profile#583
David Gross
#583
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#584
Ron Chernow
#584
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ronald Chernow is an American writer, journalist, and biographer. He has written bestselling historical non-fiction biographies. Chernow won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2011 American History Book Prize for his 2010 book Washington: A Life. He is also the recipient of the National Book Award for Nonfiction for his 1990 book The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance. His biographies of Alexander Hamilton and John D. Rockefeller were both nominated for National Book Critics Circle Awards. His biography of Hamilton inspired the popular Hamilton musical, which Chernow worked on as a historical consultant.
Go to Profile#585
Robin Morgan
#585
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robin Morgan is an American poet, writer, activist, journalist, lecturer and former child actor. Since the early 1960s, she has been a key radical feminist member of the American Women's Movement, and a leader in the international feminist movement. Her 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful was cited by the New York Public Library as "One of the 100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century.". She has written more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and was editor of Ms. magazine.
Go to Profile#586
Saul Bellow
#586
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Saul Bellow was a Canadian–American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
Go to Profile#587
Bernie Madoff
#587
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Bernard Lawrence Madoff was an American fraudster and financier who was the admitted mastermind of the largest known Ponzi scheme in history, worth an estimated $65 billion. He was at one time chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange. Madoff's firm had two basic units: a stock brokerage and an asset management business; the Ponzi scheme was centered in the asset management business.
Go to Profile#588
Chuck Yeager
#588
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Brigadier General Charles Elwood Yeager was a United States Air Force officer, flying ace, and record-setting test pilot who in October 1947 became the first pilot in history confirmed to have exceeded the speed of sound in level flight.
Go to Profile#589
Charles Tilly
#589
Overall Influence
1929 - 2008 (79 years)
Charles Tilly was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was a professor of history, sociology, and social science at the University of Michigan from 1969 to 1984 before becoming the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#590
Gian-Carlo Rota
#590
Overall Influence
1932 - 1999 (67 years)
Gian-Carlo Rota was an Italian-American mathematician and philosopher. He spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in combinatorics, functional analysis, probability theory, and phenomenology.
Go to Profile#591
Geraldo Rivera
#591
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Geraldo Rivera is an American journalist, attorney, author, and political commentator who worked at the Fox News Channel from 2001 to 2023. He hosted the tabloid talk show Geraldo from 1987 to 1998. He gained publicity with the live 1986 TV special The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults. Rivera hosted the news magazine program Geraldo at Large, hosts the occasional broadcast of Geraldo Rivera Reports . He served as a rotating co-host of The Five from 2022 to 2023.
Go to Profile#592
Grady Booch
#592
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Grady Booch is an American software engineer, best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. He is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software architecture, software engineering, and collaborative development environments.
Go to Profile#593
Baz Luhrmann
#593
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Mark Anthony "Baz" Luhrmann is an Australian film director, producer, writer, and actor. With projects spanning film, television, opera, theater, music, and recording industries, he is regarded by some as a contemporary example of an auteur for his style and deep involvement in the writing, directing, design, and musical components of all his work. He is the most commercially successful Australian director, with four of his films in the top ten highest worldwide grossing Australian films of all time.
Go to Profile#594
Qasem Soleimani
#594
Overall Influence
1957 - 2020 (63 years)
Qasem Soleimani was an Iranian military officer who served in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps . From 1998 until his assassination in 2020, he was the commander of the Quds Force, an IRGC division primarily responsible for extraterritorial and clandestine military operationss. In his later years, he was considered by some analysts to be the right-hand man of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, as well as the second-most powerful person in Iran behind him.
Go to Profile#595
K. Eric Drexler
#595
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Kim Eric Drexler is an American engineer best known for introducing molecular nanotechnology , and his studies of its potential from the 1970s and 1980s. His 1991 doctoral thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was revised and published as the book Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation , which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992. He has been called the "godfather of nanotechnology".
Go to Profile#596
Alvin Toffler
#596
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Alvin Eugene Toffler was an American writer, futurist, and businessman known for his works discussing modern technologies, including the digital revolution and the communication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide. He is regarded as one of the world's outstanding futurists.
Go to Profile#597
Philippa Foot
#597
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Philippa Ruth Foot was an English philosopher and one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics. Her work was inspired by Aristotelian ethics. Along with Judith Jarvis Thomson, she is credited with inventing the trolley problem. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. She was a granddaughter of the U.S. President Grover Cleveland.
Go to Profile#598
Sebastian Thrun
#598
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Sebastian Thrun is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he founded Google X and Google's self-driving car team. He is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University and at Georgia Tech.
Go to Profile#599
Anthony Downs
#599
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Anthony Downs was an American economist specializing in public policy and public administration. His research focuses included political choice theory, rent control, affordable housing, and transportation economics. He wrote a number of books including, An Economic Theory of Democracy and Inside Bureaucracy , which have been major influences on the public choice school of political economy. In Downs's Law of Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion , he accurately predicted that expanding expressways could not reduce traffic congestion, since demand would increase as well, and that reducing speeds incre...
Go to Profile#600
Leda Cosmides
#600
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
