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
#5951
Snuff Garrett
#5959
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Thomas Lesslie Garrett known as Snuff Garrett or Tommy Garrett, was an American record producer whose most famous work was during the 1960s and 1970s. Early years Garrett was born in Dallas, Texas, United States, and attended South Oak Cliff High School, dropping out in the 10th grade. In 1976, he returned to Dallas to receive a special high school diploma that conferred an "honorary music degree."
Go to Profile#5952
Jeffrey C. Alexander
#5960
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jeffrey Charles Alexander is an American sociologist, and a prominent social theorist. He is the founding figure in the school of cultural sociology he refers to as the "strong program". Career He was born May 30, 1947, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Alexander gained his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 1969 and his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978. He was originally interested in Marxist sociology and followed the work of Fred Block and debates in the journal Socialist Revolution, but evolved to a democratic socialist, then left li...
Go to Profile#5953
Álvaro Siza Vieira
#5961
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Álvaro Joaquim de Melo Siza Vieira is a Portuguese architect, and architectural educator. He is internationally known as Álvaro Siza and in Portugal as Siza Vieira . Early life and education Siza was born in Matosinhos, a small coastal town near Porto. He graduated in architecture in 1955, at the former School of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, the current FAUP – Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto. There he met his wife, Maria Antónia Siza , with whom he had a daughter and son.
Go to Profile#5954
Germain Grisez
#5962
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Germain Gabriel Grisez was a French-American philosopher. Grisez's development of ideas from Thomas Aquinas has redirected Catholic thought and changed the way it has engaged with secular moral philosophy. In 'The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q. 94, A. 2' Grisez attacked the neo-scholastic interpretation of Aquinas as holding that moral norms are derived from methodologically antecedent knowledge of human nature. Grisez defended the idea of metaphysical free choice, and proposed a natural law theory of practical reasoning and moral judgeme...
Go to Profile#5955
Paul Frommer
#5963
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Paul R. Frommer is an American communications professor at the University of Southern California and a linguistics consultant. He is the former Vice President, Special Projects Coordinator, Strategic Planner, and Writer-Researcher at Bentley Industries in Los Angeles, California. From 2005 to 2008, he served as Director of the Center for Management Communication at the USC Marshall School of Business.
Go to Profile#5956
Daniel Spoerri
#5964
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Daniel Spoerri is a Swiss artist and writer born in Romania. Spoerri is best known for his "snare-pictures," a type of assemblage or object art, in which he captures a group of objects, such as the remains of meals eaten by individuals, including the plates, silverware and glasses, all of which are fixed to the table or board, which is then displayed on a wall. He also is widely acclaimed for his book, Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard , a literary analog to his snare-pictures, in which he mapped all the objects located on his table at a particular moment, describing each with his personal rec...
Go to Profile#5957
Stephen R. Donaldson
#5965
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Stephen Reeder Donaldson is an American fantasy, science fiction and mystery novelist, most famous for The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, his ten-novel fantasy series. His work is characterized by psychological complexity, conceptual abstractness, moral bleakness, and the use of an arcane vocabulary, and has attracted critical praise for its "imagination, vivid characterizations, and fast pace". Donaldson earned his bachelor's degree from The College of Wooster and a Master's degree from Kent State University. He currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Go to Profile#5958
Robert A. Leonard
#5966
Overall Influence
Robert Andrew Leonard is an American linguist. He is best known for his work in forensic linguistics, which relates to investigating problems of the law by using the study of language. This includes analyzing legal material work such as notes, audio and video tape recordings, contracts, and confessions. Prior to his academic career, Leonard was a founding member of the rock band Sha Na Na and performed at Woodstock.
Go to Profile#5959
John A. Leslie
#5967
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
John Andrew Leslie is a Canadian philosopher and writer. Biography Leslie was educated at Wadham College, Oxford, earning his B.A. in English Literature in 1962 and his M.Litt. in Classics in 1968. He is currently Professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada.
Go to Profile#5960
Mark Mazower
#5968
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mark Mazower is a British historian. His areas of expertise are Greece, the Balkans and, more generally, 20th-century Europe. He is Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University in New York City.
Go to Profile#5961
Robert Trappl
#5969
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Robert Trappl is an Austrian scientist and head of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Vienna, which was founded in 1984. He is known for his work in the field of cybernetics and artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#5962
Sam Parnia
#5970
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Sam Parnia is a British associate professor of Medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center where he is also director of research into cardiopulmonary resuscitation. In the United Kingdom, he is director of the Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton. Parnia is known for his work on near-death experiences and cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Go to Profile#5963
Otto Schmitt
#5971
Overall Influence
1913 - 1998 (85 years)
Otto Herbert Schmitt was an American inventor, engineer, and biophysicist known for his scientific contributions to biophysics and for establishing the field of biomedical engineering. Schmitt also coined the term biomimetics and invented or co-invented the Schmitt trigger, the differential amplifier, and the chopper-stabilized amplifier.
Go to Profile#5964
Azouz Begag
#5972
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Azouz Begag is a French writer, politician and researcher in economics and sociology at the CNRS. He was the delegate minister for equal opportunities of France in the government of French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin till 5 April 2007. He resigned to support the moderate centrist candidate François Bayrou, one of the two UMP ministers to do so.
Go to Profile#5965
Scott Lash
#5973
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Scott Lash is a professor of sociology and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Lash obtained a BSc in Psychology from the University of Michigan, an MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, and a PhD from the London School of Economics . Lash began his teaching career as a lecturer at Lancaster University and became a professor in 1993. He moved to London in 1998 to take up his present post as Director for the Centre for Cultural Studies and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College.
Go to Profile#5966
John Simon
#5974
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
John Ivan Simon was an American writer and literary, theater, and film critic. After spending his early years in Belgrade, he moved to the United States, serving in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II and studying at Harvard University. Beginning in the 1950s, he wrote arts criticism for a variety of publications, including a 36-year tenure as theatre critic for New York magazine, and latterly as a blogger.
Go to Profile#5967
Pascal Engel
#5975
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Pascal Engel is a French philosopher, working on the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of logic. He was a professor of philosophy of logic at the Sorbonne. He currently works at the University of Geneva, where he collaborates with, among others, Kevin Mulligan. He is a member of Institut Nicod.
Go to Profile#5968
Simon Plouffe
#5976
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Simon Plouffe is a mathematician who discovered the Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula which permits the computation of the nth binary digit of π, in 1995. His other 2022 formula allows extracting the nth digit of in decimal. He was born in Saint-Jovite, Quebec.
Go to Profile#5969
José Enrique Moyal
#5977
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
José Enrique Moyal was an Australian mathematician and mathematical physicist who contributed to aeronautical engineering, electrical engineering and statistics, among other fields. Career Moyal helped establish the phase space formulation of quantum mechanics in 1949 by bringing together the ideas of Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and Hip Groenewold.
Go to Profile#5970
Nikolai Kardashev
#5978
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Nikolai Semyonovich Kardashev was a Soviet and Russian astrophysicist, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, and the deputy director of the Astro Space Center of PN Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
Go to Profile#5971
David Baulcombe
#5979
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sir David Charles Baulcombe is a British plant scientist and geneticist. he is a Royal Society Research Professor. From 2007 to 2020 he was Regius Professor of Botany in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#5972
Hashem Aghajari
#5980
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Seyyed Hashem Aghajari is an Iranian historian, university professor and a critic of the Islamic Republic's government who was sentenced to death in 2002 for apostasy for a speech he gave on Islam urging Iranians to "not blindly follow" Islamic clerics. In 2004, after domestic Iranian and international outcry, his sentence was reduced to five years in prison.
Go to Profile#5973
Christo Grozev
#5981
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Christo Grozev is a Bulgarian investigative journalist and author. He is the lead Russia investigator with Bellingcat, focusing on security threats, extraterritorial clandestine operations, and the weaponization of information. His investigations into the identity of the suspects involved in the 2018 poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal earned him and his team the European Press Prize for Investigative Journalism.
Go to Profile#5974
Alfred Blumstein
#5982
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
#5975
Norman Zada
#5983
Overall Influence
Norman Zada is a former adjunct mathematics professor and an entrepreneur. He is the founder of Perfect 10, an adult magazine focusing on women without cosmetic surgery, and runs the United States Investing Competition. Zada is the son of Lotfi Zadeh, the creator of fuzzy logic.
Go to Profile#5976
Julius Erving
#5984
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Julius Winfield Erving II , commonly known by the nickname Dr. J, is an American former professional basketball player. Erving helped legitimize the American Basketball Association , and he was the best-known player in that league when it merged into the National Basketball Association after the 1975–1976 season.
Go to Profile#5977
Bibb Latané
#5985
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Bibb Latané is an American social psychologist. He worked with John M. Darley on bystander intervention in emergencies. He has also published many articles on social attraction in animals, social loafing in groups, and the spread of social influence in populations.
Go to Profile#5978
John Harris
#5986
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
John Rhys Harris is a British journalist, writer and critic. He is the author of The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock ; So Now Who Do We Vote For?, which examined the 2005 UK general election; a 2006 behind-the-scenes look at the production of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon; and Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll . His articles have appeared in Select, Q, Mojo, Shindig!, Rolling Stone, Classic Rock, The Independent, the New Statesman, The Times and The Guardian.
Go to Profile#5979
Herbert Federer
#5987
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Herbert Federer was an American mathematician. He is one of the creators of geometric measure theory, at the meeting point of differential geometry and mathematical analysis. Career Federer was born July 23, 1920, in Vienna, Austria. After emigrating to the US in 1938, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning the Ph.D. as a student of Anthony Morse in 1944. He then spent virtually his entire career as a member of the Brown University Mathematics Department, where he eventually retired with the title of Professor Emeritus.
Go to Profile#5980
David Sillence
#5988
Overall Influence
David Owen Sillence is an academic and medical geneticist. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Sydney, where he was the foundation chair of Medical Genetics. An honours graduate of the University of Sydney, he obtained his MD in Medical Genetics from the University of Melbourne 1978 in bone dysplasia.
Go to Profile#5981
Kevin Rudd
#5989
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Kevin Michael Rudd is an Australian diplomat and former politician who served as the 26th prime minister of Australia from 2007 to 2010 and June 2013 to September 2013. He held office as the leader of the Australian Labor Party . Rudd has been the 23rd and current ambassador of Australia to the United States since 2023.
Go to Profile#5982
Humphrey Carpenter
#5990
Overall Influence
1946 - 2005 (59 years)
Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter was an English biographer, writer, and radio broadcaster. He is known especially for his biographies of J. R. R. Tolkien and other members of the literary society the Inklings.
Go to Profile#5983
Pierre-André Taguieff
#5991
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Pierre-André Taguieff is a French philosopher who has specialised in the study of racism and antisemitism. He is the director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in an Institut d'études politiques de Paris laboratory, the Centre for Political Research . He is also a member of the Cercle de l'Oratoire think tank.
Go to Profile#5984
Scott Hahn
#5992
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Scott Walker Hahn is an American Catholic theologian and Christian apologist. A former Protestant, Presbyterian minister who converted to Catholicism, Hahn's popular works include Rome Sweet Home and The Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth. His lectures have been featured in multiple audio distributions through Lighthouse Catholic Media. Hahn is known for his research on Early Christianity during the Apostolic Age and various theoretical works concerning the early Church Fathers.
Go to Profile#5985
Neil Turok
#5993
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Neil Geoffrey Turok is a South African physicist. He has held the Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh since 2020, and has been director emeritus of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics since 2019. He specializes in mathematical physics and early-universe physics, including the cosmological constant and a cyclic model for the universe.
Go to Profile#5986
Hans Kollhoff
#5994
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Hans Kollhoff is a German architect and professor. He is a representative of Postmodern and New Classical Architecture, as well as a protagonist of New Urbanism. Early life Kollhoff spent the first six years of his life on the family farm in Thuringia at the southern tip of the newly established DDR. In 1953 the family escaped to West Germany and settled in Northern Baden.
Go to Profile#5987
Marc Quinn
#5995
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Marc Quinn is a British contemporary visual artist whose work includes sculpture, installation, and painting. Quinn explores "what it is to be human in the world today" through subjects including the body, genetics, identity, environment, and the media. His work has used materials that vary widely, from blood, bread and flowers, to marble and stainless steel. Quinn has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sir John Soane's Museum, the Tate Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Fondation Beyeler, Fondazione Prada, and South London Gallery. The artist was a notable member of the Young British A...
Go to Profile#5988
H. Allen Orr
#5996
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
H. Allen Orr is the Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester. Education and career Orr earned his bachelor's degree in Biology and Philosophy from the College of William and Mary and his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Chicago. At Chicago, Orr studied under Jerry Coyne. He performed postdoctoral research at the University of California, Davis.
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Richard Henderson
#5997
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Richard Henderson is a British molecular biologist and biophysicist and pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank.„Thanks to his work, we can look at individual atoms of living nature, thanks to cryo-electron microscopes we can see details without destroying samples, and for this he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry."
Go to Profile#5990
Jim Abbiss
#5998
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jim Abbiss is a British music producer, best known for his work on records including the debut album of Editors , Arctic Monkeys' Mercury Music Prize winning debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, Kasabian's Kasabian and Empire, Ladytron's Witching Hour and Ladytron, Sneaker Pimps' debut Becoming X, and Adele's 19, and 21.
Go to Profile#5991
Susan Solomon
#5999
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
#5992
Joe Sacco
#6000
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Joe Sacco is a Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist. He is best known for his comics journalism, in particular in the books Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza , on Israeli–Palestinian relations; and Safe Area Goražde and The Fixer on the Bosnian War. In 2020, Sacco released , published by Henry Holt and Company.
Go to Profile#5993
James S. Albus
#6001
Overall Influence
1935 - 2011 (76 years)
James Sacra Albus was an American engineer, Senior NIST Fellow and founder and former chief of the Intelligent Systems Division of the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology .
Go to Profile#5994
Bal Thackeray
#6002
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Bal Keshav Thackeray also known as Balasaheb Thackeray, was an Indian politician who founded the Shiv Sena, a right-wing pro-Marathi and Hindu nationalist party active mainly in the state of Maharashtra.
Go to Profile#5995
Joseph Keller
#6003
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Joseph Bishop Keller was an American mathematician who specialized in applied mathematics. He was best known for his work on the "geometrical theory of diffraction" . Early life and education Born in Paterson, New Jersey on July 31, 1923, Keller attended Eastside High School, where he was a member of the math team. After earning his undergraduate degree in 1943 at New York University, Keller obtained his PhD in 1948 from NYU under the supervision of Richard Courant. He was a professor of mathematics in the Courant Institute at New York University until 1979. Then he was Professor of Mathemat...
Go to Profile#5996
James Hendler
#6004
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
James Alexander Hendler is an artificial intelligence researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States, and one of the originators of the Semantic Web. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
Go to Profile#5997
Zhao Ziyang
#6005
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Zhao Ziyang was a Chinese politician. He was the third premier of the People's Republic of China from 1980 to 1987, vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1981 to 1982, and CCP general secretary from 1987 to 1989. He was in charge of the political reforms in China from 1986, but lost power in connection with the reformative neoauthoritarianism current and his support of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Go to Profile#5998
Wesley Morris
#6006
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Wesley Morris is an American film critic and podcast host. He is currently critic-at-large for The New York Times, as well as co-host, with Jenna Wortham, of the New York Times podcast Still Processing. Previously, Morris wrote for The Boston Globe, then Grantland. He won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his work with The Globe and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his New York Times coverage of race relations in the United States, making Morris the only writer to have won the Criticism prize more than once.
Go to Profile#5999
Barbara Johnson
#6007
Overall Influence
1947 - 2009 (62 years)
Barbara Ellen Johnson was an American literary critic and translator, born in Boston. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives—including deconstruction, Lacanianian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory—into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France.
Go to Profile#6000
Mike Davis
#6008
Overall Influence
1946 - 2022 (76 years)
Michael Ryan Davis was an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism .
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