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
#5851
Roberto Bolaño
#5859
Overall Influence
1953 - 2003 (50 years)
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes , and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes as a "work so rich and dazzling that it will surely draw readers and scholars for ages". The New York Times described him as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation".
Go to Profile#5852
Fred Halliday
#5860
Overall Influence
1946 - 2010 (64 years)
Simon Frederick Peter Halliday was an Irish writer and academic specialising in International Relations and the Middle East, with particular reference to the Cold War, Iran, and the Arabian peninsula.
Go to Profile#5853
Elmar Altvater
#5861
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Elmar Altvater was Professor of Political Science at the Otto-Suhr-Institut of the Free University of Berlin, before retiring on 30 September 2004. He continued to work at the institute, and published articles and books.
Go to Profile#5854
Dan Lusthaus
#5862
Overall Influence
Dan Lusthaus is an American writer on Buddhism. He is a graduate of Temple University's Department of Religion, and is a specialist in Yogācāra. The author of several articles and books on the topic, Lusthaus has taught at UCLA, Florida State University, the University of Missouri, and in the Autumn of 2020 he was an Associate in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#5855
Jean Carbonnier
#5863
Overall Influence
1908 - 2003 (95 years)
Jean Carbonnier was one of the most important French jurists of the 20th century. He was a civil law specialist and a private law professor. Life and career Jean Carbonnier was the son of Fernand Carbonnier and Dany Daniel. He married Madeleine Hugues.
Go to Profile#5856
Janet Murray
#5864
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Janet Horowitz Murray is an American professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Before coming to Georgia Tech in 1999, she was a Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT, where she taught humanities and led advanced interactive design projects since 1971. She is well known as an early developer of humanities computing applications, a seminal theorist of digital media, and an advocate of new educational programs in digital media.
Go to Profile#5857
José Emilio Pacheco
#5865
Overall Influence
1939 - 2014 (75 years)
José Emilio Pacheco Berny was a Mexican poet, essayist, novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the major Mexican poets of the second half of the 20th century. The Berlin International Literature Festival has praised him as "one of the most significant contemporary Latin American poets". In 2009 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize for his literary oeuvre.
Go to Profile#5858
Eugene McCarthy
#5866
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Eugene Joseph McCarthy was an American politician, writer, and academic from Minnesota. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1949 to 1959 and the United States Senate from 1959 to 1971. McCarthy sought the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1968 election, challenging incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson on an anti-Vietnam War platform. McCarthy unsuccessfully ran for U.S. president four more times.
Go to Profile#5859
Shmuel Winograd
#5867
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Shmuel Winograd was an Israeli-American computer scientist, noted for his contributions to computational complexity. He has proved several major results regarding the computational aspects of arithmetic; his contributions include the Coppersmith–Winograd algorithm and an algorithm for the fast Fourier transform which transforms it into a problem of computing convolutions which can be solved with another Winograd's algorithm.
Go to Profile#5860
Jair Bolsonaro
#5868
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jair Messias Bolsonaro is a Brazilian politician and retired military officer who served as the 38th president of Brazil from 2019 to 2022. He previously served in the Brazil Chamber of Deputies from 1991 to 2018.
Go to Profile#5861
Jesús Mosterín
#5869
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
Jesús Mosterín was a leading Spanish philosopher and a thinker of broad spectrum, often at the frontier between science and philosophy. Biography He was born in Bilbao in 1941. He studied in Spain, Germany, and the USA. Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Barcelona since 1983, he founded there an active Department of Logic, Philosophy and History of Science. Since 1996, he has been Research Professor at the National Research Council of Spain . He is a fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh and a member of several international academies. He ...
Go to Profile#5862
David Letterman
#5870
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David Michael Letterman is an American television host, comedian, writer and producer. He hosted late night television talk shows for 33 years, beginning with the February 1, 1982, debut of Late Night with David Letterman on NBC and ending with the May 20, 2015, broadcast of Late Show with David Letterman on CBS. In total, Letterman hosted 6,080 episodes of Late Night and Late Show, surpassing his friend and mentor Johnny Carson as the longest-serving late-night talk show host in American television history.
Go to Profile#5863
Jan Švankmajer
#5871
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Jan Švankmajer is a Czech filmmaker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self-labeled surrealist known for his stop-motion animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, and many others.
Go to Profile#5864
Benjamin Libet
#5872
Overall Influence
1916 - 2007 (91 years)
Benjamin Libet was an American neuroscientist who was a pioneer in the field of human consciousness. Libet was a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco. In 2003, he was the first recipient of the Virtual Nobel Prize in Psychology from the University of Klagenfurt, "for his pioneering achievements in the experimental investigation of consciousness, initiation of action, and free will".
Go to Profile#5865
Patricia M. Shields
#5873
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Patricia M. Shields is a Regents' Professor in the Political Science Department at Texas State University. Since 2001 she has been Editor-in-Chief of the international and interdisciplinary journal Armed Forces & Society. She is also a Contributing Editor to Parameters: The US Army War College Quarterly and the Section Editor of the Military and Society section to the Handbook of Military Sciences. Shields is notable for her publications focusing on research methods, civil military relations, gender issues, pragmatism in public administration, peace studies, and the contributions of Jane Addams to public administration and peace theory.
Go to Profile#5866
Stephen Robinson
#5874
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Stephen Kern Robinson is an American former NASA astronaut. Education He was active in the Boy Scouts of America, where he achieved its second-highest rank, Life Scout. Robinson graduated from Campolindo High School, Moraga, California, in 1973, and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical and aeronautical engineering from the University of California, Davis, in 1978, a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 1985; and a doctorate in mechanical engineering, with a minor in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University in 1990.
Go to Profile#5867
Des Lynam
#5875
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Desmond Michael Lynam, is an Irish-born television and radio presenter. In a broadcasting career spanning more than forty years, he has hosted television coverage of many of the world's major sporting events, presenting Grandstand, Match of the Day, Wimbledon, the Grand National, Sportsnight, the World Cup and Olympic Games, as well as presenting non-sporting programmes such as Holiday, How Do They Do That? and Countdown.
Go to Profile#5868
Erik Demaine
#5876
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
#5869
Herbert J. Gans
#5877
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Herbert J. Gans is a German-born American sociologist who taught at Columbia University from 1971 to 2007. One of the most prolific and influential sociologists of his generation, Gans came to America in 1940 as a refugee from Nazi Germany and has sometimes described his scholarly work as an immigrant's attempt to understand America. He trained in sociology at the University of Chicago, where he studied with David Riesman and Everett Hughes, among others, and in social planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where his dissertation was supervised by Martin Meyerson.
Go to Profile#5870
Valerie Amos, Baroness Amos
#5878
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Valerie Ann Amos, Baroness Amos, is a British Labour Party politician and diplomat who served as the eighth UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. Before her appointment to the UN, she served as British High Commissioner to Australia. She was created a life peer in 1997, serving as Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council from 2003 to 2007.
Go to Profile#5871
China Miéville
#5879
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
China Tom Miéville is a British speculative fiction writer and literary critic. He often describes his work as "weird fiction", and is allied to the loosely associated movement of writers called New Weird.
Go to Profile#5872
Roy Fielding
#5880
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Roy Thomas Fielding is an American computer scientist, one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification and the originator of the Representational State Transfer architectural style. He is an authority on computer network architecture and co-founded the Apache HTTP Server project.
Go to Profile#5873
Mikhail Epstein
#5881
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mikhail Naumovich Epstein is a Russian-American literary scholar, essayist, and cultural theorist best known for his contributions to the study of Russian postmodernism. He is the S. C. Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. His writings encompass Russian literature and intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, the creation of new ideas in the age of electronic media, semiotics, and interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities. His works have been translated into over 26 languages.
Go to Profile#5874
Rudolf Meidner
#5882
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
Rudolf Alfred Meidner was a Swedish economist and socialist. Biography Son of Alfred Meidner and Elise Bandmann, Meidner was born on 23 June 1914 in Breslau, Silesia. He was forced to flee Nazi Germany after the Reichstag fire in Berlin 1933, being Jewish and a socialist.
Go to Profile#5875
Frank Muir
#5883
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Frank Herbert Muir was an English comedy writer, radio and television personality, and raconteur. His writing and performing partnership with Denis Norden endured for most of their careers. Together they wrote BBC Radio's Take It from Here for over 10 years, and then appeared on BBC radio quizzes My Word! and My Music for another 35. Muir became Assistant Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC in the 1960s, and was then London Weekend Television's founding Head of Entertainment. His many writing credits include editorship of The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, as well as the What-a-Mess books...
Go to Profile#5876
Jonathan Glover
#5884
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jonathan Glover is a British philosopher known for his books and studies on ethics. He currently teaches ethics at King's College London. Glover is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution in the United States, and is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
Go to Profile#5877
Birendra of Nepal
#5885
Overall Influence
1945 - 2001 (56 years)
Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev was King of Nepal from 1972 until his assassination in 2001. He was the eldest son of King Mahendra. Early life and education Birendra was born at the Narayanhiti Royal Palace in Kathmandu as the eldest son of the then Crown Prince Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev and his first wife, Crown Princess Indra Rajya Lakshmi Devi.
Go to Profile#5878
Junji Ito
#5886
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Junji Ito is a Japanese horror manga artist. Some of his most notable works include Tomie, a series chronicling an immortal girl who drives her stricken admirers to madness; Uzumaki, a three-volume series about a town obsessed with spirals; and Gyo, a two-volume story in which fish are controlled by a strain of sentient bacteria called "the death stench." His other works include The Junji Ito Horror Comic Collection, a collection of his many short stories, and Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu, a self-parody about him and his wife living in a house with two cats.
Go to Profile#5879
Richard H. Brodhead
#5887
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Richard Halleck Brodhead is an American scholar of 19th-century American literature and served as the 9th president of Duke University in North Carolina from 2004 to 2017. Early life and education Brodhead was born April 17, 1947, in Dayton, Ohio. His family moved to Fairfield, Connecticut when he was six years old, where he attended public schools. He attended Phillips Academy, where his high school classmates included Dick Wolf and George W. Bush. He attended Yale University, where, during his senior year, he was tapped for membership in the secret society Manuscript and as a member of the Elizabethan Club.
Go to Profile#5880
Don Page
#5888
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Don Nelson Page, , is an American-born Canadian theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta, Canada. Work Page's work focuses on quantum cosmology and theoretical gravitational physics, and he is noted for being a doctoral student of Stephen Hawking, in addition to publishing several journal articles with him. Page got his BA at William Jewell College in the United States in 1971, attaining an MS in 1972 and a PhD in 1976 at Caltech.
Go to Profile#5881
Thomas Felix Rosenbaum
#5889
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Thomas Felix Rosenbaum is an American condensed matter physicist, professor of physics, and the current president of the California Institute of Technology . Previously, Rosenbaum served as a faculty member and Provost of the University of Chicago. He has also served as the vice president for research at Argonne National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#5882
Michael Buerk
#5890
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Michael Duncan Buerk is a British journalist and newsreader. He presented BBC News from 1973 to 2002 and has been the host of BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze since 1990. He was also the presenter of BBC One's docudrama 999 from 1992 to 2003. From 2017, Buerk also presented the TV programme Royal Recipes which ran for two series.
Go to Profile#5883
Jon Meacham
#5891
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
#5884
Harrison Ford
#5892
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Harrison Ford is an American actor. He has been a leading man in films of several genres and is regarded as an American cultural icon. His films have grossed more than $5.4billion in North America and more than $9.3billion worldwide, making him the seventh-highest-grossing actor in North America. He is the recipient of various accolades, including the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2000, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2002, an Honorary César in 2010, and an Honorary Palme d'Or in 2023, in addition to an Academy Award nomination.
Go to Profile#5885
Luciano Maiani
#5893
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Luciano Maiani is a Sammarinese physicist best known for his prediction of the charm quark with Sheldon Glashow and John Iliopoulos . Academic history In 1964 Luciano Maiani received his degree in physics and he became a research associate at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Italy. During that same year he collaborated with Raoul Gatto's theoretical physics group at the University of Florence. He crossed the Atlantic in 1969 to do a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard's Lyman Laboratory of Physics. In 1976 Maiani became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome, however ...
Go to Profile#5886
He Jiankui
#5894
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Areas of Specialization: Biophysics Jiankui He is a biophysics researcher, former professor at Southern University of Science and Technology, and the creator of the first gene-edited babies. He earned a BS from the University of Science and Technology of China and a PhD from Rice University. While at Rice University, he began working with CRISPR, and throughout his career, has used CRISPR on human embryos, mice and monkeys. He is the founder of two biotechnology companies, Direct Genomics and Vienomics Biotech. His most notable accomplishment, a successful gene-editing experiment, resulted in the birth of the very first gene-edited babies.
Go to Profile#5887
Dorothy Otnow Lewis
#5895
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Dorothy Otnow Lewis is an American psychiatrist and author who has been an expert witness at a number of high-profile cases. She specializes in the study of violent individuals and people with dissociative identity disorder , formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Lewis has worked with death row inmates as well as other prison inmates convicted for crimes of passion and violence, and was the director of the DID clinic at Bellevue Hospital, associated with New York University in New York City. She is a professor of psychiatry at Yale and New York University and is the author of Guilty...
Go to Profile#5888
Eric Zaslow
#5896
Overall Influence
Eric Zaslow is an American mathematical physicist at Northwestern University. Biography Zaslow attended Harvard University, earning his Ph.D. in physics in 1995, with thesis "Kinks, twists, and folds : exploring the geometric musculature of quantum field theory" written under the direction of Cumrun Vafa. His research focuses on mathematical questions arising from duality symmetries in theoretical physics such as mirror symmetry. With Andrew Strominger and Shing-Tung Yau, he formulated the SYZ conjecture.
Go to Profile#5889
Grayson Perry
#5897
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Sir Grayson Perry is an English contemporary artist, writer and broadcaster. He is known for his ceramic vases, tapestries, and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles".
Go to Profile#5890
Mercedes Lackey
#5898
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mercedes Ritchie Lackey is an American writer of fantasy novels. Many of her novels and trilogies are interlinked and set in the world of Velgarth, mostly in and around the country of Valdemar. Her Valdemar novels include interaction between human and non-human protagonists with many different cultures and social mores.
Go to Profile#5891
Ghassan Salamé
#5899
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ghassan Salamé is a Paris-based Lebanese academic. He served as the Lebanese Minister of Culture from 2000 to 2003. He was the Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs and professor of International Relations at Sciences Po. Salamé served as the head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya from 2017 to 2020.
Go to Profile#5892
Bobby Robson
#5900
Overall Influence
1933 - 2009 (76 years)
Sir Robert William Robson was an English footballer and football manager. His career included periods playing for and later managing the England national team and being a UEFA Cup-winning manager at Ipswich Town. He is widely considered to be one of the best English managers of all time as well as one of the greatest managers in the history of the game.
Go to Profile#5893
Ed Rollins
#5901
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Edward Rollins is an American political consultant and advisor who has worked on several high-profile Republican political campaigns in the United States. In 1983 and 1984, Rollins was national campaign director for the successful Reagan-Bush 1984 campaign. He is currently Chief Political Strategist at the pro-Ron DeSantis PAC Ready for Ron.
Go to Profile#5894
Marta Kauffman
#5902
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Marta Fran Kauffman is an American television writer and producer. She is best known as the co-creator of the NBC sitcom Friends with her longtime friend, David Crane; Crane and Kauffman similarly were in a friend group with four other people. Both Kauffman and Crane were also executive producers of the show, along with Kevin Bright. Kauffman and Crane produced Veronica's Closet and Jesse. From 2005 to 2006 she was an executive producer on Related. Both writers were the creators of the HBO series Dream On. Without Crane she co-created the Netflix series Grace and Frankie.
Go to Profile#5895
Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester
#5903
Overall Influence
1901 - 2004 (103 years)
Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, was the wife of Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, the third son of King George V and Queen Mary. She was the mother of Prince William of Gloucester and Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester.
Go to Profile#5896
A. K. Dewdney
#5904
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Alexander Keewatin Dewdney is a Canadian mathematician, computer scientist, author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist. Dewdney is the son of Canadian artist and author Selwyn Dewdney, and brother of poet Christopher Dewdney.
Go to Profile#5897
Jan van Leeuwen
#5905
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jan van Leeuwen is a Dutch computer scientist and Emeritus professor of computer science at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University. Education and career Van Leeuwen completed his undergraduate studies in mathematics at Utrecht University in 1967 and received a PhD in mathematics in 1972 from the same institution under the supervision of Dirk van Dalen. After postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty positions at SUNY at Buffalo and the Pennsylvania State University, he returned to Utrecht as a faculty member in 1977. He was head of his department from 1977 to 1983, and again from 1991 to 1994, and dean from 1994 to 2009.
Go to Profile#5898
Dave Ogilvie
#5906
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Dave "Rave" Ogilvie is a Canadian record producer, mixer, songwriter and musician, known for being a former member of bands Skinny Puppy and Jakalope. Ogilvie started his recording career in Vancouver working as an engineer at Mushroom Studios. He was the mixing engineer on Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar album.
Go to Profile#5899
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
#5907
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger was a German author, poet, translator, and editor. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Andreas Thalmayr, Elisabeth Ambras, Linda Quilt and Giorgio Pellizzi. Enzensberger was regarded as one of the literary founding figures of the Federal Republic of Germany and wrote more than 70 books, with works translated into 40 languages. He was one of the leading authors in Group 47, and influenced the 1968 West German student movement. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize and the Pour le Mérite, among many others.
Go to Profile#5900
Andreas Schleicher
#5908
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Andreas Schleicher is a German mathematician, statistician and researcher in the field of education who is currently the director for education and skills, and special adviser on education policy to the secretary-general, at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris.
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