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
#5551
Harriet Zuckerman
#5559
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Harriet Anne Zuckerman is an American sociologist and professor emerita of Columbia University. Zuckerman specializes in the sociology of science. She is known for her work on the social organization of science, scientific elites, the accumulation of advantage, the Matthew effect, and the phenomenon of multiple discovery.
Go to Profile#5552
Ha Jin
#5560
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jin Xuefei is a Chinese-American poet and novelist using the pen name Ha Jin . Ha comes from his favorite city, Harbin. His poetry is associated with the Misty Poetry movement. Early life Ha Jin was born in Liaoning, China. His father was a military officer; at thirteen, Jin joined the People's Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution. Jin began to educate himself in Chinese literature and high school curriculum at sixteen. He left the army when he was nineteen, as he entered Heilongjiang University and earned a bachelor's degree in English studies. This was followed by a master's degre...
Go to Profile#5553
Eric Scerri
#5561
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
#5554
Van H. Vu
#5562
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Van H. Vu is a Vietnamese mathematician, Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. Education and career Vu was born in Hanoi in 1970. He went to special math classes for gifted children at Chu Van An and Hanoi-Amsterdam high schools. In 1987, he went to Hungary for his undergraduate studies, and in 1994, obtained his M.Sc in mathematics at the Faculty of Sciences of the Eötvös University, Budapest. His thesis supervisor was Tamás Szőnyi. He received his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1998 under the direction of László Lovász. He worked as a postdoc at IAS and Microsoft Research .
Go to Profile#5555
Tatyana Zaslavskaya
#5563
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Tatyana Ivanovna Zaslavskaya was a Russian economic sociologist and a theoretician of perestroika. She was the prime author of the Novosibirsk Report and several books on the economy of the Soviet Union and in sociology of the countryside. She was a member of the Consulting Committee to the President of Russia from 1991 to 1992 and also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Zaslavskaya was the founder of RPORC and also its director in the years from 1987 to 1992. In 2000 she was the Laureate of the Demidov Prize and the honorary president of the Levada Center.
Go to Profile#5556
Charles David Keeling
#5564
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
Charles David Keeling was an American scientist whose recording of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory confirmed Svante Arrhenius's proposition of the possibility of anthropogenic contribution to the greenhouse effect and global warming, by documenting the steadily rising carbon dioxide levels. The Keeling Curve measures the progressive buildup of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere.
Go to Profile#5557
James Paul Gee
#5565
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
James Gee is a retired American researcher who has worked in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy. Gee most recently held the position as the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University, originally appointed there in the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education. Gee has previously been a faculty affiliate of the Games, Learning, and Society group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is a member of the National Academy of Education.
Go to Profile#5558
Zhou Guangzhao
#5566
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Zhou Guangzhao is a Chinese theoretical physicist who served as President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences from 1987 to 1997. Early life and education Zhou Guangzhao was born on May 15, 1929, in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. He was the 5th child of the civil engineer Zhou Fengjiu, and the younger brother of biochemist/geneticist Zhou Guangyu. He graduated from Tsinghua University in 1951, and then did graduate work in theoretical physics for three years at Beijing University. He stayed at Beijing Univ. on the faculty after completing his PhD. In 1957 he was sent to the USSR by t...
Go to Profile#5559
Gore Vidal
#5567
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays interrogated the social and cultural sexual norms he perceived as driving American life. Beyond literature, Vidal was heavily involved in politics. He unsuccessfully sought office twice as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the U.S. House of Representatives , and later in 1982 to the U.S. Senate .
Go to Profile#5560
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#5568
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American professor and novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Go to Profile#5561
John Lyons
#5569
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Sir John Lyons FBA was a British linguist, working on semantics. Education John Lyons was born and brought up in Stretford, Lancashire . He was initially educated at St Ann's RC School, Stretford, before he won a scholarship to St Bede's College, Manchester, joining in September 1943. In July 1950, Lyons progressed to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in Classics in 1953 and a Diploma in Education in 1954.
Go to Profile#5562
David Edelstein
#5570
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
David Edelstein is a freelance American film critic who has been the principal film critic for Slate and New York magazine, among others, and has appeared regularly on NPR's Fresh Air and CBS Sunday Morning programs. Over a long career, Edelstein has published more than 2000 film reviews. In 2021, Colin McEnroe called Edelstein "America's greatest living film critic".
Go to Profile#5563
Martin C. Jischke
#5571
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Martin Charles Jischke is a prominent American higher-education administrator and advocate, and was the tenth president of Purdue University. Jischke has served as chairman and board member of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, and as a board member of the American Council on Education, National Merit Scholarship Corporation, and the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities. He has also served as a board member for Kerr McGee Corporation, Wabash National Corporation, and Duke Realty.
Go to Profile#5564
Madeleine L'Engle
#5572
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Madeleine L'Engle was an American writer of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and young adult fiction, including A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels: A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. Her works reflect both her Christian faith and her strong interest in modern science.
Go to Profile#5565
Martin Hairer
#5573
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
#5566
Joachim Lambek
#5574
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Joachim "Jim" Lambek was a Canadian mathematician. He was Peter Redpath Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at McGill University, where he earned his PhD degree in 1950 with Hans Zassenhaus as advisor.
Go to Profile#5567
Ian Frazer
#5575
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Ian Hector Frazer is a Scottish-born Australian immunologist, the founding CEO and Director of Research of the Translational Research Institute . Frazer and Jian Zhou developed and patented the basic technology behind the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer at the University of Queensland. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute, Georgetown University, and University of Rochester also contributed to the further development of the cervical cancer vaccine in parallel.
Go to Profile#5568
Gary Kleck
#5576
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Gary Kleck is a criminologist and the David J. Bordua Professor Emeritus of Criminology at Florida State University. Early life and education Kleck was born in Lombard, Illinois, to William and Joyce Kleck. He attended Glenbard East High School before enrolling in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he received his BA , MA , and PhD , all in Sociology.
Go to Profile#5569
Lina Wertmüller
#5577
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller , known as Lina Wertmüller , was an Italian film director and screenwriter. She is best known for her 1970s art house films Seven Beauties , The Seduction of Mimi, Love and Anarchy, and Swept Away.
Go to Profile#5570
William Kentridge
#5578
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
William Kentridge is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films, especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s. The latter are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.
Go to Profile#5571
Jack D. Dunitz
#5579
Overall Influence
1923 - 2021 (98 years)
Jack David Dunitz FRS was a British chemist and widely known chemical crystallographer. He was Professor of Chemical Crystallography at the ETH Zurich from 1957 until his official retirement in 1990. He held Visiting Professorships in the United States, Israel, Japan, Canada, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Go to Profile#5572
Icek Ajzen
#5580
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Icek Ajzen is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and is best known for his work, with Martin Fishbein, on the theory of planned behavior. Ajzen has been ranked the most influential individual scientist within social psychology in terms of cumulative research impact and, in 2013, received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. His research has been influential across diverse fields such as advertising, health psychol...
Go to Profile#5573
Hermann Haken
#5581
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Hermann Haken is physicist and professor emeritus in theoretical physics at the University of Stuttgart. He is known as the founder of synergetics and one of the "fathers" of quantum-mechanical laser theory. He is a cousin of the mathematician Wolfgang Haken, who proved the Four color theorem. He is a nephew of Werner Haken, a doctoral student of Max Planck.
Go to Profile#5574
Kristo Ivanov
#5582
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Kristo Ivanov is a Swedish-Brazilian information scientist and systems scientist of ethnic Bulgarian origin. He is professor emeritus at the Department of informatics of Umeå University in Sweden. Biography Ivanov was born in Belgrade in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but grew up and was educated in Italy and later in Brazil where he graduated in electronic engineering at the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica. In 1961 he moved to Sweden, where he worked as an electronic engineer in the telecommunications and computer industries, with assignments in France and the USA. In 1972 he obtained a PhD...
Go to Profile#5575
Jeff Gerstmann
#5583
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Jeff Gerstmann is an American video game journalist. Former editorial director of the gaming website GameSpot and the co-founder of the gaming website Giant Bomb, Gerstmann began working at GameSpot in the fall of 1996, around the launch of VideoGameSpot when GameSpot split PC and console games into separate areas. He shared his thoughts on a variety of other subjects every Monday on his GameSpot blog before his controversial dismissal from GameSpot in 2007 following a review of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. In 2012, Complex magazine named Gerstmann in their top 25 biggest celebrities in the video ...
Go to Profile#5576
Michael W. Young
#5584
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Michael Warren Young is an American biologist and geneticist. He has dedicated over three decades to research studying genetically controlled patterns of sleep and wakefulness within Drosophila melanogaster.
Go to Profile#5577
Chuck Klosterman
#5585
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Charles John Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. Klosterman is the author of twelve books, including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. He was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor award for music criticism in 2002.
Go to Profile#5578
Miranda Hart
#5586
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Miranda Katherine Hart Dyke is an English comedian, actress and writer. Following drama training at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts, Hart began writing material for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and making appearances in various British sitcoms, including Hyperdrive and Not Going Out .
Go to Profile#5579
Elliot Scheiner
#5587
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Elliot Ray Scheiner is a music producer, mixer and engineer. Scheiner has received 27 Grammy Award nominations , four Emmy nominations , three TEC Awards nominations, a TEC Hall of Fame inductee, and was a recipient of the Surround Pioneer Award.
Go to Profile#5580
Paula Rego
#5588
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Dame Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, widely considered the pre-eminent woman artist of the late 20th and early 21st century, known particularly for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. Rego's style evolved from abstract towards representational, and she favoured pastels over oils for much of her career. Her work often reflects feminism, coloured by folk-themes from her native Portugal,
Go to Profile#5581
J. Patrice McSherry
#5589
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Joan Patrice McSherry is a professor of political science at Long Island University. She specializes in the study of Latin American politics and she wrote the book Predatory States, which detailed the United States involvement in the Operation Condor. McSherry is founding chair and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at the LIU campus. She won LIU's David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2008 and received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Political Science MA-Ph.D Program of the CUNY Graduate Center in 2009. She has been awarded several Fulbright grants , and has authored several books and coedited another.
Go to Profile#5582
John Jakes
#5590
Overall Influence
1932 - 2023 (91 years)
John William Jakes was an American writer, best known for historical and speculative fiction. His American Civil War trilogy, North and South, has sold millions of copies worldwide. He was also the author of The Kent Family Chronicles. Jakes used the pen name Jay Scotland among others.
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Bruce Botnick
#5591
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Bruce Botnick is an American audio engineer and record producer. He is best known for co-producing L.A. Woman, the sixth studio album by the Doors, after producer Paul A. Rothchild quit during production of the album. Botnick is also known for producing for Eddie Money and his platinum albums Eddie Money and Life for the Talking, as well as Steve Perry's platinum album Street Talk. Botnick also engineered for the Beach Boys and their eleventh studio album Pet Sounds, as well as producing and engineering for acts such as Love, Buffalo Springfield, Dave Mason, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Rol...
Go to Profile#5584
Giuseppe Occhialini
#5592
Overall Influence
1907 - 1993 (86 years)
Giuseppe Paolo Stanislao "Beppo" Occhialini ForMemRS was an Italian physicist who contributed to the discovery of the pion or pi-meson decay in 1947 with César Lattes and Cecil Frank Powell, the latter winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work. At the time of this discovery, they were all working at the H. H. Wills Laboratory of the University of Bristol.
Go to Profile#5585
Larry Schweikart
#5593
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Larry Earl Schweikart is an American historian and retired professor of history at the University of Dayton. During the 1980s and 1990s, he authored numerous scholarly publications. In recent years, he has authored popular books, including A Patriot's History of the United States and 48 Liberal Lies About American History. According to professors Guy Burton and Ted Goertzel, "Schweikart and Allen are both history professors with distinguished publication records."
Go to Profile#5586
Pratap Bhanu Mehta
#5594
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is an Indian academician. He was the president of the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank and was the Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University from July 2017 to July 2019.
Go to Profile#5587
Justin L. Barrett
#5595
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Justin L. Barrett is an American experimental psychologist, Founder and President of Blueprint 1543, a nonprofit organization. He formerly was the Director of the Thrive Center for Human Development in Pasadena, California, Thrive Professor of Developmental Science, and Professor of Psychology at Fuller Graduate School of Psychology. He previously was a senior researcher and director of the Centre for Anthropology and Mind at the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#5588
Koen Lenaerts
#5596
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Koen Lenaerts, Baron Lenaerts is a Belgian jurist and the President of the Court of Justice of the European Union. He is also a Professor of European Law at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and was a member of the Coudenberg group, a Belgian federalist think tank.
Go to Profile#5589
Robert McEliece
#5597
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Robert J. McEliece was the Allen E. Puckett Professor and a professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology best known for his work in error-correcting coding and information theory. He was the 2004 recipient of the Claude E. Shannon Award and the 2009 recipient of the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal. He was a life fellow of the IEEE and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998.
Go to Profile#5590
Gerald Early
#5598
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Gerald Lyn Early is an American essayist and American culture critic. He is currently the Merle Kling Professor of Modern letters, of English, African studies, African-American studies, American culture studies, and Director, Center for Joint Projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
Go to Profile#5591
Peter Carey
#5599
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Peter Philip Carey AO is an Australian novelist. He is one of only five writers to have won the Booker Prize twice—the others being J. G. Farrell, J. M. Coetzee, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood. Carey won his first Booker Prize in 1988, for Oscar and Lucinda, and won his second Booker Prize in 2001, for True History of the Kelly Gang. In May 2008, he was nominated for the Best of the Booker Prize.
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Van Morrison
#5600
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sir George Ivan "Van" Morrison is a singer-songwriter and musician from Northern Ireland whose recording career spans seven decades. Morrison began performing as a teenager in the late 1950s, playing a variety of instruments including guitar, harmonica, keyboards and saxophone for various Irish showbands, covering the popular hits of that time. Known as "Van the Man" to his fans, Morrison rose to prominence in the mid-1960s as the lead singer of the Belfast R&B band Them, with whom he wrote and recorded "Gloria", which became a garage band staple. His solo career started under the pop-hit oriented guidance of Bert Berns with the release of the hit single "Brown Eyed Girl" in 1967.
Go to Profile#5593
Peter Jackson
#5601
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Sir Peter Robert Jackson is a New Zealand film director, screenwriter and producer. He is best known as the director, writer and producer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy , both of which are adapted from the novels of the same name by J. R. R. Tolkien. Other notable films include the critically lauded drama Heavenly Creatures , the horror comedy The Frighteners , the epic monster remake film King Kong , the World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old and the documentary The Beatles: Get Back . He is the fourth-highest-grossing film director of all-time, his ...
Go to Profile#5594
Pete Seeger
#5602
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
Peter Seeger was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene," which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture, workers' rights, and environmental causes.
Go to Profile#5595
Yoram Dinstein
#5603
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Yoram Dinstein is an Israeli scholar and professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University. He is a specialist on international law, and a prominent authority on the laws of war. He served as President of Tel Aviv University from 1991 to 1998. Won the 2023 Israel prize for law research.
Go to Profile#5596
Vladimir Toporov
#5604
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
Vladimir Nikolayevich Toporov was a leading Russian philologist associated with the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. His wife was Tatyana Elizarenkova. He is also recognized as a prominent Balticist. Background Toporov authored more than 1500 works, including Akhmatova and Dante , Towards the Reconstruction of the Indo-European Rite , Aeneas: a Man of Destiny , Myth. Rite. Symbol. Image , Holiness and Saints in the Russian Spiritual Culture , and Petersburg Text of Russian Literature . He translated the Dhammapada into Russian and supervised the ongoing edition of the most complete vocabulary of...
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Joe Buck
#5605
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Joseph Francis Buck is an American sportscaster for ESPN. The son of sportscaster Jack Buck, he worked for Fox Sports from its 1994 inception through 2022, including roles as lead play-by-play announcer for the network's National Football League and Major League Baseball coverage. He served as a television play-by-play announcer for the World Series over a 25-year span from 1996 to 2021 .
Go to Profile#5598
Stephen R. L. Clark
#5606
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Stephen Richard Lyster Clark is an English philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Clark specialises in the philosophy of religion and animal rights, writing from a philosophical position that might broadly be described as Christian Platonist. He is the author of twenty books, including The Moral Status of Animals , The Nature of the Beast , Animals and Their Moral Standing , G.K. Chesterton , Philosophical Futures , and Ancient Mediterranean Philosophy , as well as 77 scholarly articles, and chapters in another 109 books. He is a former editor-in-chie...
Go to Profile#5599
Avi Loeb
#5607
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Abraham "Avi" Loeb is an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, where since 2007 he has been Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics. He chaired the Department of Astronomy from 2011–2020, and founded the Black Hole Initiative in 2016.
Go to Profile#5600
Michael Frank Goodchild
#5608
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Michael Frank Goodchild is a British-American geographer. He is an Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After nineteen years at the University of Western Ontario, including three years as chair, he moved to Santa Barbara in 1988, as part of the establishment of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, which he directed for over 20 years. In 2008, he founded the UCSB Center for Spatial Studies.
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