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
#5501
Nora Volkow
#5509
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Nora D. Volkow is a Mexican-American psychiatrist. She is currently the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse , which is part of the National Institutes of Health . Early life and education Born in Mexico City, Volkow is a daughter of Esteban Volkov, whose mother Zinaida Volkova was the eldest daughter of the Russian communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Volkow and her three sisters grew up in Coyoacán in the house where Trotsky was killed .
Go to Profile#5502
Mike Pence
#5510
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Michael Richard Pence is an American politician who served as the 48th vice president of the United States from 2017 to 2021 under Donald Trump. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as the 50th governor of Indiana from 2013 to 2017, and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2001 to 2013.
Go to Profile#5503
William Gaddis
#5511
Overall Influence
1922 - 1998 (76 years)
William Thomas Gaddis Jr. was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place . The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.
Go to Profile#5504
F. Sherwood Rowland
#5512
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Frank Sherwood "Sherry" Rowland was an American Nobel laureate and a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. His research was on atmospheric chemistry and chemical kinetics. His best-known work was the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons contribute to ozone depletion.
Go to Profile#5505
Shizuo Kakutani
#5513
Overall Influence
1911 - 2004 (93 years)
Shizuo Kakutani was a Japanese-American mathematician, best known for his eponymous fixed-point theorem. Biography Kakutani attended Tohoku University in Sendai, where his advisor was Tatsujirō Shimizu. At one point he spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton at the invitation of the mathematician Hermann Weyl. While there, he also met John von Neumann.
Go to Profile#5506
Nicholas Kurti
#5514
Overall Influence
1908 - 1998 (90 years)
Nicholas Kurti, was a Hungarian-born British physicist who lived in Oxford, UK, for most of his life. Career Born in Budapest, Kurti went to high school at the Minta Gymnasium, but due to anti-Jewish laws he had to leave the country, gaining his master's degree at the Sorbonne in Paris. He obtained his doctorate in low-temperature physics in Berlin, working with Professor Franz Simon. Kurti and Simon continued to work together during 1931–1933 at the Technische Hochschule in Breslau. However, when Adolf Hitler rose to power, both Simon and Kurti left Germany, joining the Clarendon Laborator...
Go to Profile#5507
Basil Hiley
#5515
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Basil J. Hiley , is a British quantum physicist and professor emeritus of the University of London. Long-time colleague of David Bohm, Hiley is known for his work with Bohm on implicate orders and for his work on algebraic descriptions of quantum physics in terms of underlying symplectic and orthogonal Clifford algebras. Hiley co-authored the book The Undivided Universe with David Bohm, which is considered the main reference for Bohm's interpretation of quantum theory.
Go to Profile#5508
W. Richard Stevens
#5516
Overall Influence
1951 - 1999 (48 years)
William Richard Stevens was a Northern Rhodesia–born American author of computer science books, in particular books on Unix and TCP/IP. Biography Richard Stevens was born in 1951 in Luanshya, Northern Rhodesia , where his father worked for the copper industry. The family later moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, Hurley, New Mexico, Washington, D.C., and Phalaborwa, South Africa. Stevens attended Fishburne Military School in Waynesboro, Virginia. He received a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan in 1973 and both a master's degree and PhD in systems engineering from the University of Arizona.
Go to Profile#5509
Ed Burns
#5517
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Edward P. Burns is an American screenwriter and television producer. He has worked closely with writing partner David Simon. For HBO, they have collaborated on The Corner, The Wire, Generation Kill, The Plot Against America, and We Own This City. Burns is a former Baltimore police detective for the homicide and narcotics divisions, and a public school teacher. He often draws upon these experiences for his writing.
Go to Profile#5510
Josef Joffe
#5518
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Josef Joffe is a former publisher-editor of Die Zeit, a weekly German newspaper. His second career has been in academia. Appointed Senior Fellow of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in 2007 , he is also the Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations at the Hoover Institution and a courtesy professor of political science at Stanford University. Since 1999, he has been an associate of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#5511
Ilya Somin
#5519
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Ilya Somin is a law professor at George Mason University, B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, a blogger for the Volokh Conspiracy, and a former co-editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review . His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, migration rights, and the study of popular political participation and its implications for constitutional democracy.
Go to Profile#5512
Randy Orton
#5520
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Randal Keith Orton is an American professional wrestler and actor. He is currently signed to WWE on the Raw brand. With the third most world championship reigns in history, and a career spanning over 20 years, Orton is widely regarded as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time.
Go to Profile#5513
Missy Elliott
#5521
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Melissa Arnette "Missy" Elliott , also known as Misdemeanor, is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer. She embarked on her music career with R&B girl group Sista in the 1990s, and later became a member of the Swing Mob collective alongside her childhood friend and longtime collaborator Timbaland, with whom she wrote and produced music for acts such as 702, Aaliyah, SWV, and Total. Following several collaborations and guest appearances, she began her solo career in 1997 with her debut album Supa Dupa Fly, which spawned the top 20 single "Sock It 2 Me". The album debuted at No.
Go to Profile#5514
Vitalik Buterin
#5522
Overall Influence
1994 - Present (32 years)
Vitaly Dmitrievich Buterin , better known as Vitalik Buterin , is a Russian-Canadian computer programmer, and co-founder of Ethereum. Buterin became involved with cryptocurrency early in its inception, co-founding Bitcoin Magazine in 2011. In 2014, Buterin deployed the Ethereum blockchain with Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Joseph Lubin.
Go to Profile#5515
Richard Cloward
#5523
Overall Influence
1926 - 2001 (75 years)
Richard Andrew Cloward was an American sociologist and activist. He influenced the Strain theory of criminal behavior and the concept of anomie, and was a primary motivator for the passage of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, commonly known as the "Motor Voter Act". He taught at Columbia University for 47 years.
Go to Profile#5516
Will Hermes
#5524
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Will Hermes is an American author, broadcaster, journalist and critic who has written extensively about popular music. He is a longtime contributor to Rolling Stone and to National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His work has also appeared in Spin, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Believer, GQ, Salon, Entertainment Weekly, Details, City Pages , The Windy City Times, and Option. He is the author of Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever , a history of the New York City music scene in the 1970s.
Go to Profile#5517
Howard W. French
#5525
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Howard Waring French is an American journalist, author, and photographer, as well as professor since 2008 at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Prior to re-entering academia, he was a longtime foreign correspondent and senior writer with The New York Times.
Go to Profile#5518
David Foster
#5526
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David Walter Foster is a Canadian musician, composer, arranger, record producer and music executive who chaired Verve Records from 2012 to 2016. He has won 16 Grammy Awards from 47 nominations. His music career spans more than five decades, beginning in the early 1970s as a keyboardist for the pop group Skylark, before focusing largely on composing and producing.
Go to Profile#5519
David Gordon White
#5527
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
David Gordon White is an American Indologist and author on the history of yoga and tantra. He won the CHOICE book selection in religion, and an honorable mention in the PROSE book awards, both for Sinister Yogis.
Go to Profile#5520
John Simpson
#5528
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
John Cody Fidler-Simpson is an English foreign correspondent who is currently the world affairs editor of BBC News. He has spent all his working life with the BBC, and has reported from more than 120 countries, including thirty war zones, and interviewed many world leaders. He was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read English and was editor of Granta magazine.
Go to Profile#5521
Kallistos Ware
#5529
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Kallistos Ware was an English bishop and theologian of the Eastern Orthodox Church. From 1982, he held the titular bishopric of Diokleia in Phrygia , later made a titular metropolitan bishopric in 2007, under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. He was one of the best-known modern Eastern Orthodox hierarchs and theologians. From 1966 to 2001, he was Spalding Lecturer of Eastern Orthodox Studies at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#5522
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
#5530
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a Swiss-American psychiatrist, a pioneer in near-death studies, and author of the internationally best-selling book, On Death and Dying , where she first discussed her theory of the five stages of grief, also known as the "Kübler-Ross model".
Go to Profile#5523
Jeffrey Frankel
#5531
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Jeffrey Alexander "Jeff" Frankel is an international macroeconomist. He works as the James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard Kennedy School. Education Frankel graduated from Swarthmore College in 1974 with a B.A. in economics. He then received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1978.
Go to Profile#5524
César Lattes
#5532
Overall Influence
1924 - 2005 (81 years)
Cesare Mansueto Giulio Lattes , also known as César Lattes, was a Brazilian experimental physicist, one of the discoverers of the pion, a composite subatomic particle made of a quark and an antiquark.
Go to Profile#5525
Robert Coleman Richardson
#5533
Overall Influence
1937 - 2013 (76 years)
Robert Coleman Richardson was an American experimental physicist whose area of research included sub-millikelvin temperature studies of helium-3. Richardson, along with David Lee, as senior researchers, and then graduate student Douglas Osheroff, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1972 discovery of the property of superfluidity in helium-3 atoms in the Cornell University Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics.
Go to Profile#5526
Jeff Sutherland
#5534
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jeff Sutherland is one of the creators of Scrum, a framework for product management. Together with Ken Schwaber, he presented Scrum at OOPSLA'95. Sutherland contributed to the creation of the Agile Manifesto in 2001. Along with Ken Schwaber, he wrote and maintains The Scrum Guide, which contains the official definition of the framework.
Go to Profile#5527
Dave Grohl
#5535
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
David Eric Grohl is an American musician. He is the founder of the rock band Foo Fighters, for which he is the lead singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter. Prior to forming Foo Fighters, he was the drummer of Nirvana from 1990 to 1994.
Go to Profile#5528
Robert Plomin
#5536
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Robert Joseph Plomin is an American/British psychologist and geneticist best known for his work in twin studies and behavior genetics. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology.
Go to Profile#5529
Tai Tsun Wu
#5537
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Tai Tsun Wu is a Chinese-born American physicist and writer well known for his contributions to high-energy nuclear physics and statistical mechanics. Life Born in Shanghai, he studied electrical engineering at University of Minnesota and became a William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition fellow . He obtained an S.M. and Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard University. His thesis concerned I. The Concept of Impedance II. High Frequency Scattering and was advised by Ronold W. P. King. At Harvard, he continued as Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows , joined the faculty of applied physics and is currently the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics & Professor of Physics.
Go to Profile#5530
Günter M. Ziegler
#5538
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Günter Matthias Ziegler is a German mathematician who has been serving as president of the Free University of Berlin since 2018. Ziegler is known for his research in discrete mathematics and geometry, and particularly on the combinatorics of polytopes.
Go to Profile#5531
Mohammed Arkoun
#5539
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Mohammed Arkoun was an Algerian scholar and thinker. He was considered to have been one of the most influential secular scholars in Islamic studies contributing to contemporary intellectual Islamic reform. In a career of more than 30 years, he had been a critic of the tensions embedded in his field of study, advocating Islamic modernism, secularism, and humanism. During his academic career, he wrote his numerous books mostly in French, and occasionally in English and Arabic.
Go to Profile#5532
Hillel Steiner
#5540
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Hillel Isaac Steiner is a Canadian political philosopher and is Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy in 1999.
Go to Profile#5533
Richard B. Freeman
#5541
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Richard Barry Freeman is an economist. The Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University and Co-Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, Freeman is also Senior Research Fellow on Labour Markets at the Centre for Economic Performance, part of the London School of Economics, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the UK's public body funding social science. Freeman directs the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research , a network focused on the economics of science, technical, engineering, and I...
Go to Profile#5534
Matei Zaharia
#5542
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Matei Zaharia is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist, educator and the creator of Apache Spark. As of April 2022, Forbes ranked him and Ion Stoica as the 3rd-richest people in Romania with a net worth of $1.6 billion.
Go to Profile#5535
James Irwin
#5543
Overall Influence
1930 - 1991 (61 years)
James Benson Irwin was an American astronaut, aeronautical engineer, test pilot, and a United States Air Force pilot. He served as Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 15, the fourth human lunar landing. He was the 8th person to walk on the Moon and the first, and youngest, of those astronauts to die.
Go to Profile#5536
Omeljan Pritsak
#5544
Overall Influence
1919 - 2006 (87 years)
Omeljan Yosypovych Pritsak was the first Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University and the founder and first director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Career From 1921 till 1936 he lived in Ternopil, where he graduated the state Polish gymnasium. Pritsak began his academic career at the University of Lviv in interwar Poland where he studied Middle Eastern languages under local orientalists and became associated with the Shevchenko Scientific Society and attended its seminar on Ukrainian history led by Ivan Krypiakevych. After the Soviet annexation ...
Go to Profile#5537
Peter Hennessy
#5545
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Peter John Hennessy, Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield, is an English historian and academic specialising in the history of government. Since 1992, he has been Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London.
Go to Profile#5538
Stanley Wolpert
#5546
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Stanley Albert Wolpert was an American historian, Indologist, and author on the political and intellectual history of modern India and Pakistan and wrote fiction and nonfiction books on the topics. He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles , from 1959 to 2002.
Go to Profile#5539
John C. Mitchell
#5547
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
John Clifford Mitchell is professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University. He has published in the area of programming language theory and computer security. John C. Mitchell was the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning at Stanford University, the Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, co-director of the Stanford Computer Security Lab, and Professor of Education. He is a member of the steering committee for Stanford University's Cyber Initiative. Mitchell has been Vice Provost at Stanfor...
Go to Profile#5540
John M. Dillon
#5548
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
John Myles Dillon is an Irish classicist and philosopher who was Regius Professor of Greek in Trinity College, Dublin between 1980 and 2006. Prior to that he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens on 15 June 2010. Dillon's area of research lies in the history of Platonism from the Old Academy to the Renaissance, and also Early Christianity.
Go to Profile#5541
Farouk El-Baz
#5549
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Farouk El-Baz is an Egyptian American space scientist and geologist, who worked with NASA in the scientific exploration of the Moon and the planning of the Apollo program. He was a leading geologist on the program, responsible for studying the geology of the Moon, the selection of landing sites for the Apollo missions, and the training of astronauts in lunar observations and photography. He played a key role in the Apollo 11 Moon landing mission, and later Apollo missions. He also came up with the idea of touchable Moon rocks at a museum, inspired by his childhood pilgrimage to Mecca where h...
Go to Profile#5542
Ahmad Hasan Dani
#5550
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Ahmad Hassan Dani FRAS, SI, HI was a Pakistani archaeologist, historian, and linguist. He was among the foremost authorities on Central Asian and South Asian archaeology and history. He introduced archaeology as a discipline in higher education in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Throughout his career, Dani held various academic positions and international fellowships, apart from conducting archaeological excavations and research. He is particularly known for archaeological work on pre-Indus civilization and Gandhara sites in Northern Pakistan.
Go to Profile#5543
Bruno Zumino
#5551
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Bruno Zumino was an Italian theoretical physicist and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his DSc degree from the University of Rome in 1945. He was renowned for his rigorous proof of the CPT theorem with Gerhart Lüders; his pioneering systematization of effective chiral Lagrangians; the discoveries, with Julius Wess, of the Wess–Zumino model, the first four-dimensional supersymmetric quantum field theory with Bose-Fermi degeneracy, and initiator of the field of supersymmetric radiative restrictions; a concise formulation of supergravity; and for his deci...
Go to Profile#5544
Lap-Chee Tsui
#5552
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Lap-Chee Tsui is a Chinese-born Canadian geneticist and served as the 14th Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Hong Kong. Personal life He grew up in Kowloon, Hong Kong and attended .
Go to Profile#5545
Stephen G. Wheatcroft
#5553
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Stephen George Wheatcroft is a Professorial Fellow of the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include Russian pre-revolutionary and Soviet social, economic and demographic history, as well as famine and food supply problems in modern world history, the impact of media on history, and in recent developments in Russian and Ukrainian society. Wheatcroft speaks Russian fluently and has spent a good portion of his career researching in the Soviet archives, and he played a major role in publishing materials from the archives.
Go to Profile#5546
Ullin Place
#5554
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Ullin Thomas Place , usually cited as U. T. Place, was a British philosopher and psychologist. Along with J. J. C. Smart, he developed the identity theory of mind. After several years at the University of Adelaide, he taught for some years in the Department of Philosophy in the University of Leeds.
Go to Profile#5547
Marthe Gautier
#5555
Overall Influence
1925 - 2022 (97 years)
Marthe Gautier was a French medical doctor and researcher, best known for her role in discovering the link of diseases to chromosome abnormalities. Education Marthe Gautier discovered a vocation for pediatrics at an early age. In 1942 she joined her sister Paulette who was about to complete her medical studies in Paris intending to become a pediatrician. She passed the entrance exam of the "Internat des hôpitaux de Paris" and spent the next four years as an intern gaining clinical experience in pediatrics.
Go to Profile#5548
George Cybenko
#5556
Overall Influence
George V. Cybenko is the Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth and a fellow of the IEEE and SIAM. Education Cybenko obtained his BA in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1974 and received his PhD from Princeton in applied mathematics of electrical and computer engineering in 1978 under Bede Liu.
Go to Profile#5549
Gerald Zaltman
#5557
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Gerald Zaltman is the Joseph C. Wilson Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School and the author and editor of 20 books, most recently How Customers Think and Marketing Metaphoria . In 1997 he founded the market research consulting firm Olson Zaltman Associates in partnership with Jerry C. Olson, Professor of Marketing Emeritus, Smeal College of Business at Penn State. Zaltman patented, the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, a method used to delve into the unconscious thinking that drives behavior.
Go to Profile#5550
Juha Kankkunen
#5558
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Juha Matti Pellervo Kankkunen is a Finnish former rally driver. His factory team career in the World Rally Championship lasted from 1983 to 2002. He won 23 world rallies and four drivers' world championship titles, which were both once records in the series. Both Sébastien Loeb and Sébastien Ogier have since collected more world titles, but no driver was able to repeat Kankkunen's feat of becoming a world champion with three different manufacturers until Ogier matched this achievement in 2020.
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