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
#5901
Amnon Shashua
#5909
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Amnon Shashua is an Israeli computer scientist and businessman. Shashua is the Sachs Professor of Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the President and chief executive officer of the autonomous driving and driver-assistance technology company Mobileye, Co-founder of the artificial vision devices company OrCam, Founder and Owner of digital bank and chairman of the artificial intelligence company AI21 Labs.
Go to Profile#5902
Jeff Wall
#5910
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jeffrey Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver's mixture of natural beauty, urban decay, and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.
Go to Profile#5903
Deirdre Wilson
#5911
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Deirdre Susan Moir Wilson, FBA is a British linguist and cognitive scientist. She is emeritus professor of Linguistics at University College London and research professor at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo. Her most influential work has been in linguistic pragmatics—specifically in the development of Relevance Theory with French anthropologist Dan Sperber. This work has been especially influential in the Philosophy of Language. Important influences on Wilson are Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and Paul Grice. Linguists and philosophers of language who have been...
Go to Profile#5904
Rudi Dornbusch
#5912
Overall Influence
1942 - 2002 (60 years)
Rüdiger Dornbusch was a German economist who worked in the United States for most of his career. Early life and education Dornbusch was born in Krefeld in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia. After completing his secondary education at the Gymnasium am Moltkeplatz in Krefeld, he went to study abroad. He received his Licence en Sciences Politiques from the University of Geneva's Graduate Institute of International Studies in 1966, where he also stayed on for a year as an assistant in economics. He subsequently moved to the United States, where he obtained his Ph.D. in economics from the Univers...
Go to Profile#5905
Arturo Frondizi
#5913
Overall Influence
1908 - 1995 (87 years)
Arturo Frondizi Ércoli was an Argentine lawyer, journalist, teacher and politician, who was elected President of Argentina and ruled between May 1, 1958, and March 29, 1962, when he was overthrown by a military coup.
Go to Profile#5906
Sergei Guriev
#5914
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Sergey Maratovich Guriyev is a Russian economist, who is provost and a professor of economics at the Instituts d'études politiques in Paris . He is a former member of the Russian government. From 2016 to 2019, he was the chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He was a Morgan Stanley Professor of Economics and a rector at Moscow's New Economic School until he resigned on 30 April 2013 and fled to France.
Go to Profile#5907
Andrey Zaliznyak
#5915
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak was a Soviet and Russian linguist, an expert in historical linguistics, accentology, dialectology and grammar. Doctor of Philological Sciences . In his later years he paid much attention to the popularization of linguistics and the struggle against pseudoscience.
Go to Profile#5908
Philip Pearlstein
#5916
Overall Influence
1924 - 2022 (98 years)
Philip Martin Pearlstein was an American painter best known for Modernist Realist nudes. Cited by critics as the preeminent figure painter of the 1960s to 2000s, he led a revival in realist art. Biography Pearlstein was born on May 24, 1924, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to David and Libby Kalser Pearlstein. During the Great Depression, his parents sold chickens and eggs to support the family. As a child his parents supported his interest in art, sending him to Saturday morning classes at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art. In 1942, at the age of 18, two of his paintings won a national competition sponsored by Scholastic Magazine, and were reproduced in color in Life magazine.
Go to Profile#5909
Didier Fassin
#5917
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Didier Fassin is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science for the Institute for Advanced Study, the Chair of Public Health at the College de France, and holds Direction of Studies role in Political and Moral Anthropology at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He earned his MD from Pierre and Marie Curie University, an M.A. from the University of Paris, and a Ph.D. from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His career began in the medical field, during which time he served as an infectious disease specialist. He moved on to an anthropological approach, studying health inequities in Africa.
Go to Profile#5910
Jay Bhattacharya
#5918
Overall Influence
Jayanta "Jay" Bhattacharya is an Indian American professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University. He is the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. His research focuses on the economics of health care.
Go to Profile#5911
Elizabeth Warren
#5919
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Elizabeth Ann Warren is an American politician and former law professor who is the senior United States senator from Massachusetts, serving since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party and regarded as a progressive, Warren has focused on consumer protection, equitable economic opportunity, and the social safety net while in the Senate. Warren was a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, ultimately finishing third.
Go to Profile#5912
Ambeth Ocampo
#5920
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Ambeth R. Ocampo is a Filipino public historian, academic, cultural administrator, journalist, author, and independent curator. He is best known for his definitive writings about Philippines' national hero José Rizal and on topics on Philippine history and Philippine art through Looking Back, his bi-weekly editorial page column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Go to Profile#5913
Montek Singh Ahluwalia
#5921
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Montek Singh Ahluwalia is an Indian economist and civil servant who was the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission of India, a position which carried the rank of a Cabinet Minister. He tendered his resignation for this post in May 2014 following the impending end of the UPA II regime at the center. He was previously the first Director of the Independent Evaluation Office at the International Monetary Fund.
Go to Profile#5914
Harry Woolf, Baron Woolf
#5922
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Harry Kenneth Woolf, Baron Woolf, is a British life peer and retired barrister and judge. He was Master of the Rolls from 1996 until 2000 and Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales from 2000 until 2005. The Constitutional Reform Act 2005 made him the first Lord Chief Justice to be President of the Courts of England and Wales. He was a Non-Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong from 2003 to 2012. He sits in the House of Lords as a crossbencher.
Go to Profile#5915
Willem Johan Kolff
#5923
Overall Influence
1911 - 2009 (98 years)
Willem Johan "Pim" Kolff was a pioneer of hemodialysis, artificial heart, as well as in the entire field of artificial organs. Willem was a member of the Kolff family, an old Dutch patrician family. He made his major discoveries in the field of dialysis for kidney failure during the Second World War. He emigrated in 1950 to the United States, where he obtained US citizenship in 1955, and received a number of awards and widespread recognition for his work.
Go to Profile#5916
Adam Zagajewski
#5924
Overall Influence
1945 - 2021 (76 years)
Adam Zagajewski was a Polish poet, novelist, translator, and essayist. He was awarded the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, the 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, and the 2018 Golden Wreath of Poetry at the Struga Poetry Evenings.
Go to Profile#5917
Rod Laver
#5925
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Rodney George Laver is an Australian former tennis player. Laver was ranked the world number 1 professional player indisputably for five years from 1965 to 1969 and by some sources also in 1964 and 1970. He was also ranked as the number 1 amateur in 1961 and 1962. Laver won 198 singles titles which is the most won by a player in history.
Go to Profile#5918
Bruce C. Berndt
#5926
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
#5919
Benzion Netanyahu
#5927
Overall Influence
1910 - 2012 (102 years)
Benzion Netanyahu was an Israeli encyclopedist, historian, and medievalist. He served as a professor of history at Cornell University. A scholar of Judaic history, he was also an activist in the Revisionist Zionism movement, who lobbied in the United States to support the creation of the Jewish state. His field of expertise was the history of the Jews in Spain. He was an editor of the Hebrew Encyclopedia and assistant to Benjamin Azkin, Ze'ev Jabotinsky's personal secretary.
Go to Profile#5920
Craig McCracken
#5928
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Craig Douglas McCracken is an American cartoonist, animator, director, writer, and producer known for creating the Cartoon Network's The Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Disney Channel and Disney XD's Wander Over Yonder and Netflix's Kid Cosmic.
Go to Profile#5921
Daniel Spielman
#5929
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Daniel Alan Spielman has been a professor of applied mathematics and computer science at Yale University since 2006. As of 2018, he is the Sterling Professor of Computer Science at Yale. He is also the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, since its founding, and chair of the newly established Department of Statistics and Data Science.
Go to Profile#5922
Juergen Teller
#5930
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Juergen Teller is a German fine-art and fashion photographer. He was awarded the Citibank Prize for Photography in 2003 and received the Special Presentation International Center of Photography Infinity Award in 2018.
Go to Profile#5923
Nils Aall Barricelli
#5931
Overall Influence
1912 - 1993 (81 years)
Nils Aall Barricelli was a Norwegian-Italian mathematician. Barricelli's early computer-assisted experiments in symbiogenesis and evolution are considered pioneering in artificial life research. Barricelli, who was independently wealthy, held an unpaid residency at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in 1953, 1954, and 1956. He later worked at the University of California, Los Angeles, at Vanderbilt University , in the Department of Genetics of the University of Washington, Seattle and then at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Oslo. Barricelli published in ...
Go to Profile#5924
Stanley Pons
#5932
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Bobby Stanley Pons is an American electrochemist known for his work with Martin Fleischmann on cold fusion in the 1980s and 1990s. Early life Pons was born in Valdese, North Carolina. He attended Valdese High School, then Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he studied chemistry. He began his PhD studies in chemistry at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, but left before completing his PhD. His thesis resulted in a paper, co-authored in 1967 with Harry B. Mark, his adviser. The New York Times wrote that it pioneered a way to measure the spectra of chemical react...
Go to Profile#5925
Tom Ruegger
#5933
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Tom Ruegger is an American animator and songwriter. Ruegger is known for his association with Disney Television Animation and Warner Bros. Animation. He also created Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, and Histeria!.
Go to Profile#5926
Robert Baer
#5934
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Robert Booker Baer is an American author and a former CIA case officer who was primarily assigned to the Middle East. He is Time's intelligence columnist and has contributed to Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Baer speaks eight languages, won the CIA Career Intelligence Medal and is a frequent commentator and author about issues related to international relations, espionage, and U.S. foreign policy. He hosted the History reality television series Hunting Hitler. He is an Intelligence and Security Analyst for CNN. His book See No Evil was adapted by the director S...
Go to Profile#5927
Frits Staal
#5935
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Johan Frederik "Frits" Staal was the department founder and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and South/Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Staal specialized in the study of Vedic ritual and mantras, and the scientific exploration of ritual and mysticism. He was also a scholar of Greek and Indian logic and philosophy and Sanskrit grammar.
Go to Profile#5928
Edward Larrabee Barnes
#5936
Overall Influence
1915 - 2004 (89 years)
Edward Larrabee Barnes was an American architect. His work was characterized by the "fusing [of] Modernism with vernacular architecture and understated design." Barnes was best known for his adherence to strict geometry, simple monolithic shapes and attention to material detail. Among his best-known projects are the Haystack School, Christian Theological Seminary, Dallas Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, 599 Lexington Avenue, the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building, and the IBM Building at 590 Madison Avenue.
Go to Profile#5929
Ward Edwards
#5937
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Ward Edwards was an American psychologist, prominent for work on decision theory and on the formulation and revision of beliefs. Education Edwards attended Swarthmore College and then received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#5930
Peter Benchley
#5938
Overall Influence
1940 - 2006 (66 years)
Peter Bradford Benchley was an American author, screenwriter, and ocean activist. He is known for his bestselling novel Jaws and co-wrote its film adaptation with Carl Gottlieb. Several more of his works were also adapted for both cinema and television, including The Deep, The Island, Beast, and White Shark.
Go to Profile#5931
William Alvin Howard
#5939
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
William Alvin Howard is a proof theorist best known for his work demonstrating formal similarity between intuitionistic logic and the simply typed lambda calculus that has come to be known as the Curry–Howard correspondence. He has also been active in the theory of proof-theoretic ordinals. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1956 for his dissertation "k-fold recursion and well-ordering". He was a student of Saunders Mac Lane.
Go to Profile#5932
Joel Whitburn
#5940
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Joel Carver Whitburn was an American author and music historian, responsible for setting up the Record Research, Inc. series of books on record chart placings. Early life Joel Carver Whitburn was born in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin on November 29, 1939. He started collecting records in his teens, first subscribed to Billboard in 1953, and when the Hot 100 was introduced in 1958 started recording the chart placings of records on index cards. After graduating from Menomonee Falls High School in 1957, he attended Elmhurst College and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, but did not receive a degree ...
Go to Profile#5933
Hanna Holborn Gray
#5941
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Hanna Holborn Gray is an American historian of Renaissance and Reformation political thought and Professor of History Emerita at the University of Chicago. She served as president of the University of Chicago, from 1978 to 1993, having earlier served as acting president of Yale University in 1977–1978. At both schools, she was the first woman to hold their highest executive office. When named to the post in Chicago, she became one of the first women in the United States to hold the full presidency of a major university.
Go to Profile#5934
Babak Hassibi
#5942
Overall Influence
Babak Hassibi is an Iranian-American electrical engineer, computer scientist, and applied mathematician who is the inaugural Mose and Lillian S. Bohn Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology . From 2011 to 2016 he was the Gordon M Binder/Amgen Professor of Electrical Engineering. During 2008-2015 he was the Executive Officer of Electrical Engineering and Associate Director of Information Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#5935
Robert C. Prim
#5943
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (105 years)
Robert Clay Prim III was an American mathematician and computer scientist. Biography Robert Clay Prim III was born in Sweetwater, Texas on September 25, 1921. In 1941, Prim received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, where he also met his wife Alice Prim , whom he married in 1942. Later in 1949, he received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University, where he also worked as a research associate from 1948 until 1949.
Go to Profile#5936
Atul Butte
#5944
Overall Influence
Atul J. Butte is a biomedical informatics researcher and biotechnology entrepreneur. He is currently the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Since April 2015, Butte has serves as inaugural director of UCSF's Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute.
Go to Profile#5937
Marc Ferro
#5945
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Marc Ferro was a French historian. Life and career Ferro worked on early twentieth-century European history, specialising in the history of Russia and the USSR, as well as the history of cinema. His Ukrainian-Jewish mother was murdered during the Holocaust.
Go to Profile#5938
Ruth Lawrence
#5946
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Ruth Elke Lawrence-Neimark is a British–Israeli mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a researcher in knot theory and algebraic topology. In the public eye, she is best known for having been a child prodigy in mathematics.
Go to Profile#5939
Padmanabh Jaini
#5947
Overall Influence
1923 - 2021 (98 years)
Padmanabh Shrivarma Jaini was an Indian born scholar of Jainism and Buddhism, living in Berkeley, California, United States. He was from a Digambar Jain family; however he was equally familiar with both the Digambara and Svetambara forms of Jainism. He has taught at the Banaras Hindu University, the School of Oriental and African Studies , the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he retired in 1994. Jaini was the author of several books and papers. His best known work is The Jaina Path of Purification . Some of his major articles hav...
Go to Profile#5940
Doc Searls
#5948
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David "Doc" Searls , is an American journalist, columnist, and a widely read bloggerger. He is the host of FLOSS Weekly, a free and open-source software themed netcast from the TWiT Network, a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, Editor-in-Chief of Linux Journal, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, an alumnus fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and co-host of the Reality 2.0 Podcast.
Go to Profile#5941
Sidney Morgenbesser
#5949
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Sidney Morgenbesser was a Jewish American philosopher and professor at Columbia University. He wrote little but is remembered by many for his philosophical witticisms. Life and career Sidney Morgenbesser was born on September 22, 1921, in New York City and raised in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Go to Profile#5942
Michael Kölling
#5950
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Michael Kölling is a German computer scientist, currently working at King's College London, best known for the development of the BlueJ and Greenfoot educational development environments and as author of introductory programming textbooks. In 2013 he received the SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education for the development of the BlueJ.
Go to Profile#5943
Aleksander Wolszczan
#5951
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Aleksander Wolszczan is a Polish astronomer. He is the co-discoverer of the first confirmed extrasolar planets and pulsar planets. Early life and education Wolszczan was born on 29 April 1946 in Szczecinek located in present-day West Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland; in the 1950s his family moved to Szczecin. His father Jerzy Wolszczan taught economics at former Szczecin Polytechnic and his mother, Zofia, worked for the Polish Writers' Union. His early interest in astronomy was inspired by his father who told him stories and myths connected with stellar constellations. As a seven-year-old he already learned the basics of astronomy.
Go to Profile#5944
Miguel Nicolelis
#5952
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Miguel Ângelo Laporta Nicolelis , is a Brazilian scientist, physician and Duke School of Medicine Professor in Neuroscience at Duke University, best known for his pioneering work surrounding brain-computer interface technology.
Go to Profile#5945
Kim Sterelny
#5953
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kim Sterelny is an Australian philosopher and professor of philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. He is the winner of several international prizes in the philosophy of science, and was previously editor of Biology and Philosophy. He is also a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is currently the First Vice President of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology .
Go to Profile#5946
Bruce McEwen
#5954
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Bruce Sherman McEwen was an American neuroendocrinologist and head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University. He was known for his work on the effects of environmental and psychological stress, having coined the term allostatic load.
Go to Profile#5947
Jonathan Ott
#5955
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jonathan Ott is an ethnobotanist, writer, translator, publisher, natural products chemist and botanical researcher in the area of entheogens and their cultural and historical uses, and helped coin the term "entheogen".
Go to Profile#5948
Alanna Nash
#5956
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Alanna Kay Nash is an American journalist and biographer. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Nash holds a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of several acclaimed books. She is a 1972 graduate of Stephens College. A feature writer for The New York Times, Stereo Review, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Weekend, she was named the Society of Professional Journalists' National Member of the Year in 1994. In 1977, Nash's job afforded her the opportunity to become one of the journalists to view the remains of Elvis Presley. In her dust jacket biograp...
Go to Profile#5949
Ben Affleck
#5957
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Benjamin Géza Affleck is an American actor and filmmaker. His accolades include two Academy Awards. Affleck began his career as a child when he starred in the PBS educational series The Voyage of the Mimi . He later appeared in the independent comedy Dazed and Confused and several Kevin Smith comedies, including Chasing Amy .
Go to Profile#5950
Julia Donaldson
#5958
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Julia Catherine Donaldson is an English writer and playwright, and the 2011–2013 Children's Laureate. She is best known for her popular rhyming stories for children, especially those illustrated by Axel Scheffler, which include The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Stick Man. She originally wrote songs for children's television but has concentrated on writing books since the words of one of her songs, "A Squash and a Squeeze", were made into a children's book in 1993. Of her 184 published works, 64 are widely available in bookshops. The remaining 120 are intended for school use and include her...
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