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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#5701
Peter Mansbridge
#5709
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Peter Mansbridge is a British-born Canadian retired news anchor. From 1988 to 2017, he was chief correspondent for CBC News and anchor of The National, CBC Television's flagship nightly newscast. He was also host of CBC News Network's Mansbridge One on One. Mansbridge has received many awards and accolades for his journalistic work, including an honorary doctorate from Mount Allison University, where he served as chancellor until the end of 2017. On September 5, 2016, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation announced that Mansbridge would be stepping down as chief correspondent and anchor on ...
Go to Profile#5702
Trent Reznor
#5710
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Michael Trent Reznor is an American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, and composer. He serves as the lead vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and principal songwriter of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, which he founded in 1988 and of which he was the sole official member until 2016. The first Nine Inch Nails album, Pretty Hate Machine , was a commercial and critical success. Reznor has since released 11 more Nine Inch Nails studio albums.
Go to Profile#5703
Mikael Rothstein
#5711
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Mikael Rothstein is an associate professor of religious history at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark. Rothstein earned his PhD in 1993 and became a Lector at the University of Copenhagen in 2001. He has been on the board of the Danish Association for the History of Religions and the editorial boards of the publications Renner Studies on New Religions and Nye Religioner .
Go to Profile#5704
Per Bak
#5712
Overall Influence
1948 - 2002 (54 years)
Per Bak was a Danish theoretical physicist who coauthored the 1987 academic paper that coined the term "self-organized criticality." Life and work After receiving his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Denmark in 1974, Bak worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He specialized in phase transitions, such as those occurring when an insulator suddenly becomes a conductor or when water freezes. In that context, he also did important work on complicated spatially modulated structures in solids. This research led him to the more general question of how organization emerges from disorder.
Go to Profile#5705
Pasko Rakic
#5713
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Pasko Rakic is a Yugoslav-born American neuroscientist, who presently works in the Yale School of Medicine Department of Neuroscience in New Haven, Connecticut. His main research interest is in the development and evolution of the human brain. He was the founder and served as Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at Yale, and was founder and Director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience. He is best known for elucidating the mechanisms involved in development and evolution of the cerebral cortex. In 2008, Rakic shared the inaugural Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. He is currently the D...
Go to Profile#5706
Eric Bentley
#5714
Overall Influence
1916 - 2020 (104 years)
Eric Russell Bentley was a British-born American theater critic, playwright, singer, editor, and translator. In 1998, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. He was also a member of the New York Theater Hall of Fame, recognizing his many years of cabaret performances.
Go to Profile#5707
Simon LeVay
#5715
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Simon LeVay is a British-American neuroscientist. He received a bachelor's degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1966, a Ph.D. in Neuroanatomy at the University of Göttingen in Germany, and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School in 1974.
Go to Profile#5708
Joseph H. Silverman
#5716
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Joseph Hillel Silverman is a professor of mathematics at Brown University working in arithmetic geometry, arithmetic dynamics, and cryptography. Biography Joseph Silverman received an Sc.B. from Brown University in 1977 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982 under the direction of John Tate. He taught at M.I.T. and at Boston University before taking a position at Brown in 1988.
Go to Profile#5709
Robert Quine
#5717
Overall Influence
1942 - 2004 (62 years)
Robert Wolfe Quine was an American guitarist. A native of Akron, Ohio, Quine worked with a wide range of musicians, though he himself remained relatively unknown. Critic Mark Deming wrote that "Quine's eclectic style embraced influences from jazz, rock, and blues players of all stripes, and his thoughtful technique and uncompromising approach led to rewarding collaborations with a number of visionary musicians."
Go to Profile#5710
Janja Lalich
#5718
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Janja Lalich is an American sociologist and writer. Lalich is best known as a foremost expert on cults and coercion, charismatic authority, power relations, ideology and social control. She is a professor emerita of sociology at the California State University, Chico.
Go to Profile#5711
Wavy Gravy
#5719
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Hugh Nanton Romney Jr. , known as Wavy Gravy, is an American entertainer and peace activist best known for his role at Woodstock, as well as for his hippie persona and countercultural beliefs. Romney has founded or co-founded several organizations, including the activist commune the Hog Farm, and later, as Wavy Gravy, Camp Winnarainbow and the Seva Foundation. He founded the Phurst Church of Phun in the 1960s, a secret society of comics and clowns that aimed to support ending of the Vietnam War through political theater, and has adopted a clown persona in support of his political activism, and...
Go to Profile#5712
Keyu Jin
#5720
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Jin Keyu is a Chinese economist, associate professor of economics at the London School of Economics and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, specialising in international macroeconomics and the Chinese economy. Her research focuses on global trade imbalances, global asset prices and China's economic growth model.
Go to Profile#5713
Linda Hutcheon
#5721
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Linda Hutcheon, FRSC, O.C. is a Canadian academic working in the fields of literary theory and criticism, opera, and Canadian studies. She is a University Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she has taught since 1988. In 2000 she was elected the 117th President of the Modern Language Association, the third Canadian to hold this position, and the first Canadian woman. She is particularly known for her influential theories of postmodernism.
Go to Profile#5714
Nizar Qabbani
#5722
Overall Influence
1923 - 1998 (75 years)
Nizar Tawfiq Qabbani was a Syrian diplomat, poet, writer and publisher. He is considered to be Syria's National Poet. His poetic style combines simplicity and elegance in exploring themes of love, eroticism, religion, and Arab empowerment against foreign imperialism and local dictators. Qabbani is one of the most revered contemporary poets in the Arab world.
Go to Profile#5715
Allen W. Wood
#5723
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Allen William Wood is an American philosopher specializing in the work of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism, with particular interests in ethics and social philosophy. One of the world’s foremost Kant scholars, he is the Ruth Norman Halls professor of philosophy at Indiana University, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and has held professorships and visiting appointments at numerous universities in the United States and Europe. In addition to popularising and clarifying the ethical thought of Kant, Wood has also mounted arguments against the validity ...
Go to Profile#5716
Bernhard Schölkopf
#5724
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Bernhard Schölkopf is a German computer scientist known for his work in machine learning, especially on kernel methods and causality. He is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany, where he heads the Department of Empirical Inference. He is also an affiliated professor at ETH Zürich, honorary professor at the University of Tübingen and the Technical University Berlin, and chairman of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems .
Go to Profile#5717
Partha Chatterjee
#5725
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Partha Chatterjee is an Indian political scientist and anthropologist. He was the director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta from 1997 to 2007 and continues as an honorary professor of political science. He is also a professor of anthropology and South Asian studies at Columbia University and a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.
Go to Profile#5718
Donald Caspar
#5726
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Donald L. D. Caspar was an American structural biologist known for his works on the structures of biological molecules, particularly of the tobacco mosaic virus. He was an emeritus professor of biological science at the Institute of Molecular Biophysics, Florida State University, and an emeritus professor of biology at the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University. He has made significant scientific contributions in virus biology, X-ray, neutron and electron diffraction, and protein plasticity.
Go to Profile#5719
Torbjörn Tännsjö
#5727
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Ulf Torbjörn Harald Tännsjö is a Swedish professor of philosophy and public intellectual. He has held a chair in Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University since 2002 and he is Affiliated Professor of Medical Ethics at Karolinska Institute. Tännsjö was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stockholm University from 1976 to 1993 and Research Fellow in Political Philosophy at the Swedish Research Council in the Humanities and Social Sciences between 1993 and 1995. Thereafter, he was a professor of Practical Philosophy at Göteborg University 1995–2001.
Go to Profile#5720
Vikram Seth
#5728
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Vikram Seth is an Indian novelist and poet. He has written several novels and poetry books. He has won several awards such as Padma Shri, Sahitya Academy Award, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, WH Smith Literary Award and Crossword Book Award. Seth's collections of poetry such as Mappings and Beastly Tales are notable contributions to the Indian English language poetry canon.
Go to Profile#5721
Isiah Thomas
#5729
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Isiah Lord Thomas III , also known as "Zeke", is an American former professional basketball player, philanthropist, and coach who is an analyst for NBA TV. The 12-time NBA All-Star was named to the NBA's 50th and 75th anniversary teams, and inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. He played his entire professional career for the Detroit Pistons of the National Basketball Association . From 2000 to 2012 he coached the Indiana Pacers, New York Knicks, and for FIU.
Go to Profile#5722
Robert Summers
#5730
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Robert Summers was an American economist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1960. A widely cited early work by Summers is on the small-sample statistical properties of alternate regression estimators where analytical measures are unavailable.
Go to Profile#5723
Lawrence Buell
#5731
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Lawrence Ingalls Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, specialist on antebellum American literature and a pioneer of Ecocriticism. He is the 2007 recipient of the Jay Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary studies, the "highest professional award that the American Literature Section of the MLA can give." He won the 2003 Warren-Brooks Award for outstanding literary criticism for his 2003 book on Ralph Waldo Emerson. His Writing for an Endangered World won the 2001 John G. Cawelti Award for the best book in the field of American Culture Studies.
Go to Profile#5724
John Deely
#5732
Overall Influence
1942 - 2017 (75 years)
John Deely was an American philosopher and semiotician. He was a professor of philosophy at Saint Vincent College and Seminary in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Prior to this, he held the Rudman Chair of Graduate Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies, located at the University of St. Thomas .
Go to Profile#5725
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
#5733
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is a Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education and Dean's Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. Mohanty, a postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist, has argued for the inclusion of a transnational approach in exploring women’s experiences across the world. She is author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity , and co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism , Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures , Feminism and War: Confronting U.S.
Go to Profile#5726
Joseph Nechvatal
#5734
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Joseph Nechvatal is an American post-conceptual digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses. Life and work Joseph Nechvatal was born in Chicago. He studied fine art and philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Cornell University and Columbia University. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy of Art and Technology at the Planetary Collegium at University of Wales, Newport and has taught art theory and art history at the School of Visual Arts. He has had many solo exhibi...
Go to Profile#5727
Glen Keane
#5735
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Glen Keane is an American animator, director, author and illustrator. Keane was a character animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios for 38 years between 1974 and 2012, working on feature films such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Tarzan, and Tangled. He received the 1992 Annie Award for character animation and the 2007 Winsor McCay Award for lifetime contribution to the field of animation. He was named a Disney Legend in 2013, a year after retiring from the studio.
Go to Profile#5728
Michelle Malkin
#5736
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Michelle Malkin (née Maglalang) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to parents who had immigrated from the Philippines. She is a conservative political commentator, author, and blogger. She also founded the websites Hot Air and Twitchy. At the time of Michelle’s birth, her father, Apolo DeCastro Maglalang, was a medical student specializing in neonatology and her mother, Rafaela Maglalang (née Perez), a teacher. Upon Apolo Maglalang’s graduation from medical school, the family relocated to Absecon, New Jersey, where Michelle and her younger brother were raised. The Maglalang family was Catholic, and Michelle attended Holy Spirit Roman Catholic High School in Absecon.
Go to Profile#5729
Russell Banks
#5737
Overall Influence
1940 - 2023 (83 years)
Russell Earl Banks was an American writer of fiction and poetry. His novels are known for "detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters". His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, and often reflect "moral themes and personal relationships".
Go to Profile#5730
Ralph Johnson
#5738
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Ralph E. Johnson is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a co-author of the influential computer science textbook Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, for which he won the 2010 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award. In 2006 he was awarded the Dahl–Nygaard Prize for his contributions to the state of the art embodied in that book as well.
Go to Profile#5731
Lillian Hoddeson
#5739
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Lillian Hartman Hoddeson is an American historian of science, specializing in the history of physics and technology during the 2nd half of the 20th century. Education and career Hoddeson received in 1957 a high school diploma from the Bronx High School of Science, in 1961 a bachelor's degree in physics from Barnard College, and in 1966 a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University with a dissertation on solid-state physics. She was an assistant professor of physics from 1967 to 1970 at Barnard College and from 1971 to 1976 at Rutgers University. In 1974–1975 she was a visiting fellow at Princeton University and took Thomas Kuhn's "History of Quantum Mechanics" graduate course.
Go to Profile#5732
Val McDermid
#5740
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Valarie McDermid, is a Scottish crime writer, best known for a series of novels featuring clinical psychologist Dr. Tony Hill, in a grim sub-genre known as Tartan Noir. Biography McDermid comes from a working-class family in Fife. She studied English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she was the first student to be admitted from a Scottish state school.
Go to Profile#5733
Tim Shallice
#5741
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Timothy Shallice is a professor of neuropsychology and the founding director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, part of University College London. He has been a professor at Cognitive Neuroscience Sector of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy since 1994.
Go to Profile#5734
John Krebs, Baron Krebs
#5742
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
John Richard Krebs, Baron Krebs, FRS is an English zoologist researching in the field of behavioural ecology of birds. He was the principal of Jesus College, Oxford, from 2005 until 2015. Lord Krebs was President of the British Science Association from 2012 to 2013.
Go to Profile#5735
Yoram Moses
#5743
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Yoram Moses is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Yoram Moses received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1986. Moses is a co-author of the book Reasoning About Knowledge, and is a winner of the 1997 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science and the 2009 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing.
Go to Profile#5736
Donald A. Gillies
#5744
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Donald Angus Gillies is a British philosopher and historian of science and mathematics. He is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. Career After undergraduate studies in mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge, Gillies became a graduate student of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos at the London School of Economics, where he completed a PhD on the foundations of probability.
Go to Profile#5737
Nadia Magnenat Thalmann
#5745
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Nadia Magnenat Thalmann is a computer graphics scientist and robotician and is the founder and head of MIRALab at the University of Geneva. She has chaired the Institute for Media Innovation at Nanyang Technological University , Singapore from 2009 to 2021.
Go to Profile#5738
Alan Sillitoe
#5746
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Alan Sillitoe FRSL was an English writer and one of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied. He is best known for his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and his early short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", both of which were adapted into films.
Go to Profile#5739
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
#5747
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian philosopher, jurist and politician. His work is in the tradition of classical social theory and pragmatism, and is developed across many fields including legal theory, philosophy and religion, social and political theory, progressive alternatives, and economics. In natural philosophy he is known for The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. In social theory he is known for Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory. In legal theory he was associated with the Critical Legal Studies movement, which helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools.
Go to Profile#5740
Allan MacLeod Cormack
#5748
Overall Influence
1924 - 1998 (74 years)
Allan MacLeod Cormack was a South African American physicist who won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on X-ray computed tomography , a significant and unusual achievement since Cormack did not hold a doctoral degree in any scientific field.
Go to Profile#5741
Tim Duncan
#5749
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Timothy Theodore Duncan is an American former professional basketball player. He spent his entire 19-year career with the San Antonio Spurs in the National Basketball Association . Nicknamed "the Big Fundamental", he is widely regarded as the greatest power forward of all time and one of the greatest players in NBA history, and was a central contributor to the franchise's success during the 2000s and 2010s. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2020 and named to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team in 2021.
Go to Profile#5742
I. G. Patel
#5750
Overall Influence
1924 - 2005 (81 years)
Indraprasad Gordhanbhai Patel , popularly known as I. G. Patel, was an Indian economist and a civil servant who served as the fourteenth Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 1 December 1977 to 15 September 1982.
Go to Profile#5743
Andreas Kinneging
#5751
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Andreas Antonius Maria Kinneging is Professor of Legal Philosophy at the University of Leiden, and a conservative philosopher in the Netherlands. Background Kinneging was raised in a Catholic family in the Dutch province of Zeeland. He studied political science at the Catholic University of Nijmegen , graduating with the highest honours.
Go to Profile#5744
Daniel P. Friedman
#5752
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Daniel Paul Friedman is a professor of Computer Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His research focuses on programming languages, and he is a prominent author in the field. With David Wise, Friedman wrote a highly influential paper on lazy programming, specifically on lazy streams . The paper, entitled "Cons should not evaluate its arguments," is one of the first publications pushing for the exploration of a programming style with potentially infinite data structures and a form of programming that employs no computational effects . Over the 1970s, Friedman and Wise explor...
Go to Profile#5745
Barack Obama
#5753
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African-American president in U.S. history. Obama previously served as a U.S. senator representing Illinois from 2005 to 2008, as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004, and as a civil rights lawyer and university lecturer.
Go to Profile#5746
Levi Bryant
#5754
Overall Influence
Levi Bryant, born Paul Reginald Bryant, is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area. Bryant has written extensively about post-structural and cultural theory, including the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek. His blog, Larval Subjects, was founded in 2006 and had over 2 million hits as of September 2011.
Go to Profile#5747
Thomas C. Leonard
#5755
Overall Influence
Thomas C. Leonard is a historian of economics and scholarly authority on American economic life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries at Princeton. He is perhaps best known for his book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era. In 2017, the History of Economics Society awarded Illiberal Reformers the Joseph J. Spengler Prize for book of the year.
Go to Profile#5748
William S. Cleveland
#5756
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
William Swain Cleveland II is an American computer scientist and Professor of Statistics and Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, known for his work on data visualization, particularly on nonparametric regression and local regression.
Go to Profile#5749
Alan E. Kazdin
#5757
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Alan Edward Kazdin is Sterling Professor of Psychology and Child Psychiatry at Yale University. He is currently emeritus and was the director of the Yale Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic. Kazdin's research has focused primarily on the treatment of aggressive and antisocial behavior in children.
Go to Profile#5750
Giacomo Rizzolatti
#5758
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Giacomo Rizzolatti is an Italian neurophysiologist who works at the University of Parma. Born in Kyiv, UkSSR, he is the Senior Scientist of the research team that discovered mirror neurons in the frontal and parietal cortex of the macaque monkey, and has written many scientific articles on the topic. He also proposed the premotor theory of attention. He is a past president of the European Brain and Behaviour Society. Rizzolatti was the 2007 co-recipient, with Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese, for the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. He is an elected member of th...
Go to Profile