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
#601
Roger Stone
#601
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Roger Jason Stone is an American conservative political consultant, lobbyist, and felon. Stone is most remembered for the Robert Mueller special council investigation, and his involvement with and connections to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a political consultant for the campaign of 45th U.S. president Donald Trump.
Go to Profile#602
Joseph Nye
#602
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Joseph Samuel Nye Jr. is an American political scientist. He and Robert Keohane co-founded the international relations theory of neoliberalism, which they developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. Together with Keohane, he developed the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence. They also explored transnational relations and world politics in an edited volume in the 1970s. More recently, he pioneered the theory of soft power. His notion of "smart power" became popular with the use of this phrase by members of the Clinton Administration and the Obama Administration.
Go to Profile#603
Paul Ekman
#603
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
#604
Michael Walzer
#604
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Michael Laban Walzer is an American political theorist and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor emeritus of Dissent, an intellectual magazine that he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics—many in political ethics—including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, Zionism, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation. He is also a contributing editor to The New Republic.
Go to Profile#605
Elizabeth II
#605
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Elizabeth II was Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from 6 February 1952 until her death in 2022. She was queen regnant of 32 sovereign states over the course of her lifetime and remained the monarch of 15 realms by the time of her death. Her reign of over 70 years is the longest of any British monarch and the longest verified reign of any female head of state in history.
Go to Profile#606
Louis Nirenberg
#606
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Louis Nirenberg was a Canadian-American mathematician, considered one of the most outstanding mathematicians of the 20th century. Nearly all of his work was in the field of partial differential equations. Many of his contributions are now regarded as fundamental to the field, such as his strong maximum principle for second-order parabolic partial differential equations and the Newlander-Nirenberg theorem in complex geometry. He is regarded as a foundational figure in the field of geometric analysis, with many of his works being closely related to the study of complex analysis and differential...
Go to Profile#607
Alexei Leonov
#607
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov was a Soviet and Russian cosmonaut, Air Force major general, writer, and artist. On 18 March 1965, he became the first person to conduct a spacewalk, exiting the capsule during the Voskhod 2 mission for 12 minutes and 9 seconds. He was also selected to be the first Soviet person to land on the Moon although the project was cancelled.
Go to Profile#608
Edward Feigenbaum
#608
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Edward Albert Feigenbaum is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, and joint winner of the 1994 ACM Turing Award. He is often called the "father of expert systems." Education and early life Feigenbaum was born in Weehawken, New Jersey in 1936 to a culturally Jewish family, and moved to nearby North Bergen, where he lived until the age of 16, when he left to start college. His hometown did not have a secondary school of its own, and so he chose Weehawken High School for its college preparatory program. He was inducted into his high school's hall of fame in 1996.
Go to Profile#609
Peter Lax
#609
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
#610
Hideto Tomabechi
#610
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Hideto Tomabechi is a Japanese cognitive scientist computer scientist . He developed models for cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, cognitive psychology, mindcontroll , cognitive warfare and mathematical models for human brain information processing.
Go to Profile#611
Francisco Varela
#611
Overall Influence
1946 - 2001 (55 years)
Francisco Javier Varela García was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology, and for co-founding the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialog between science and Buddhism.
Go to Profile#612
Stanley Fish
#612
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Go to Profile#613
Robert Gallo
#613
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Robert Charles Gallo is an American biomedical researcher. He is best known for his role in establishing the human immunodeficiency virus as the infectious agent responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome and in the development of the HIV blood test, and he has been a major contributor to subsequent HIV research.
Go to Profile#614
Ian Hacking
#614
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Ian MacDougall Hacking was a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and was a member of many prestigious groups, including the Order of Canada, the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy.
Go to Profile#615
William Labov
#615
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
William Labov is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics.
Go to Profile#616
Bartel Leendert van der Waerden
#616
Overall Influence
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
Bartel Leendert van der Waerden was a Dutch mathematician and historian of mathematics. Biography Education and early career Van der Waerden learned advanced mathematics at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Göttingen, from 1919 until 1926. He was much influenced by Emmy Noether at Göttingen, Germany. Amsterdam awarded him a Ph.D. for a thesis on algebraic geometry, supervised by Hendrick de Vries. Göttingen awarded him the habilitation in 1928. In that year, at the age of 25, he accepted a professorship at the University of Groningen.
Go to Profile#617
Vincent Canby
#617
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Vincent Canby was an American film and theatre critic who served as the chief film critic for The New York Times from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in 2000. He reviewed more than one thousand films during his tenure there.
Go to Profile#618
Willem de Kooning
#618
Overall Influence
1904 - 1997 (93 years)
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried.
Go to Profile#619
Mary Douglas
#619
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Dame Mary Douglas, was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture, symbolism and risk, whose area of speciality was social anthropology. Douglas was considered a follower of Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.
Go to Profile#620
Chien-Shiung Wu
#620
Overall Influence
1912 - 1997 (85 years)
Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, while Wu herself was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.
Go to Profile#621
William L. Shirer
#621
Overall Influence
1904 - 1993 (89 years)
William Lawrence Shirer was an American journalist and war correspondent. He wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a history of Nazi Germany that has been read by many and cited in scholarly works for more than 50 years. Originally a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the International News Service, Shirer was the first reporter hired by Edward R. Murrow for what became a CBS radio team of journalists known as "Murrow's Boys". He became known for his broadcasts from Berlin, from the rise of the Nazi dictatorship through the first year of World War II . Along with Murrow, ...
Go to Profile#622
Edgar Morin
#622
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (103 years)
Edgar Morin is a French philosopher and sociologist of the theory of information who has been recognized for his work on complexity and "complex thought" , and for his scholarly contributions to such diverse fields as media studies, politics, sociology, visual anthropology, ecology, education, and systems biology. As he explains: He holds two bachelors: one in history and geography and one in law. He never did a Ph.D. Though less well known in the anglophone world due to the limited availability of English translations of his over 60 books, Morin is renowned in the French-speaking world, Euro...
Go to Profile#623
Zygmunt Bauman
#623
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish-born sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. He emigrated to Israel; three years later he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later Emeritus. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.
Go to Profile#624
Alfred Aho
#624
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Alfred Vaino Aho is a Canadian computer scientist best known for his work on programming languages, compilers, and related algorithms, and his textbooks on the art and science of computer programming.
Go to Profile#625
Roald Hoffmann
#625
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Roald Hoffmann is a Polish-American theoretical chemist who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He has also published plays and poetry. He is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, emeritus, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.
Go to Profile#626
Martin Rees
#626
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, appointed in 1995, and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010.
Go to Profile#627
Henri Lefebvre
#627
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Henri Lefebvre was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectical materialism, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism. In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles. He founded or took part in the founding of several intellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La Revue Marxiste, Arguments, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Espaces et Socié...
Go to Profile#628
Robert Fogel
#628
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Robert William Fogel was an American economic historian and scientist, and winner of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As of his death, he was the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions and director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He is best known as an advocate of new economic history – the use of quantitative methods in history.
Go to Profile#629
Joseph Brodsky
#629
Overall Influence
1940 - 1996 (56 years)
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Russian and American poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad , Soviet Union, in 1940, Brodsky ran afoul of Soviet authorities and was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, settling in the United States with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at Mount Holyoke College, and at universities including Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, and Michigan. Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". He was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 19...
Go to Profile#630
Tommy Mottola
#630
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Thomas Daniel Mottola is an American record executive. Mottola is currently the Chairman of Mottola Media Group and was previously the Chairman and CEO of Sony Music Entertainment, parent of the Columbia label, for nearly 15 years. Since 2000, he has been married to Mexican actress and singer Thalía.
Go to Profile#631
John F. Kelly
#631
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
John Francis Kelly is an American former political advisor and retired U.S. Marine Corps general who served as White House chief of staff for President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2019. He had previously served as Secretary of Homeland Security in the Trump administration and was commander of United States Southern Command. He is now a board member at Caliburn International.
Go to Profile#632
David H. Hubel
#632
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
David Hunter Hubel was an American Canadian neurophysiologist noted for his studies of the structure and function of the visual cortex. He was co-recipient with Torsten Wiesel of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine , for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system. For much of his career, Hubel worked as the Professor of Neurobiology at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Medical School. In 1978, Hubel and Wiesel were awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. In 1983, Hubel received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy...
Go to Profile#633
Richard Rogers
#633
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Richard George Rogers, Baron Rogers of Riverside, was a British-Italian architect noted for his modernist and constructivist designs in high-tech architecture. He was a senior partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, previously known as the Richard Rogers Partnership, until June 2020.
Go to Profile#634
Albert Ellis
#634
Overall Influence
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Albert Ellis was an American psychologist and psychotherapist who founded rational emotive behavior therapy . He held MA and PhD degrees in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and was certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology . He also founded, and was the President of, the New York City-based Albert Ellis Institute. He is generally considered to be one of the originators of the cognitive revolutionary paradigm shift in psychotherapy and an early proponent and developer of cognitive-behavioral therapies.
Go to Profile#635
Raymond Cattell
#635
Overall Influence
1905 - 1998 (93 years)
Raymond Bernard Cattell was a British-American psychologist, known for his psychometric research into intrapersonal psychological structure. His work also explored the basic dimensions of personality and temperament, the range of cognitive abilities, the dynamic dimensions of motivation and emotion, the clinical dimensions of abnormal personality, patterns of group syntality and social behavior, applications of personality research to psychotherapy and learning theory, predictors of creativity and achievement, and many multivariate research methods including the refinement of factor analytic methods for exploring and measuring these domains.
Go to Profile#636
Pelé
#636
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Edson Arantes do Nascimento , better known by his nickname Pelé , was a Brazilian professional footballer who played as a forward. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, he was among the most successful and popular sports figures of the 20th century. In 1999, he was named Athlete of the Century by the International Olympic Committee and was included in the Time list of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. In 2000, Pelé was voted World Player of the Century by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics and was one of the two joint winners of the FIFA Player of the Century.
Go to Profile#637
Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank
#637
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Norman Robert Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, is a British architect and designer. Closely associated with the development of high-tech architecture, Foster is recognised as a key figure in British modernist architecture. His architectural practice Foster + Partners, first founded in 1967 as Foster Associates, is the largest in the United Kingdom, and maintains offices internationally. He is the president of the Norman Foster Foundation, created to 'promote interdisciplinary thinking and research to help new generations of architects, designers and urbanists to anticipate the future'. The foundation, which opened in June 2017, is based in Madrid and operates globally.
Go to Profile#638
Leslie Lamport
#638
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Leslie B. Lamport is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual.
Go to Profile#639
Robert Sternberg
#639
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
#640
Gordon Tullock
#640
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Gordon Tullock was an American economist and professor of law and economics at the George Mason University School of Law. He is best known for his work on public choice theory, the application of economic thinking to political issues. He was one of the founding figures in his field.
Go to Profile#641
Robert Crumb
#641
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Dennis Crumb is an American cartoonist who often signs his work R. Crumb. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture.
Go to Profile#642
Brian Aldiss
#642
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Brian Wilson Aldiss was an English writer, artist and anthology editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss, except for occasional pseudonyms during the mid-1960s.
Go to Profile#643
Michiko Kakutani
#643
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Go to Profile#644
McGeorge Bundy
#644
Overall Influence
1919 - 1996 (77 years)
McGeorge "Mac" Bundy was an American academic who served as the U.S. National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 through 1966. He was president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 through 1979. Despite his career as a foreign-policy intellectual, educator, and philanthropist, he is best remembered as one of the chief architects of the United States' escalation of the Vietnam War during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
Go to Profile#645
Salvatore Riina
#645
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Salvatore Riina , called , Totò being the diminutive of Salvatore"the beast"Sicilian: u capu di 'i capi, "the boss of all [the] bosses" Riina succeeded Luciano Leggio as head of the Corleonesi criminal organisation in the mid-1970s and achieved dominance through a campaign of violence, which caused police to target his rivals. Riina had been a fugitive since the late 1960s after he was indicted on a murder charge. He was less vulnerable to law enforcement's reaction to his methods, as the policing removed many of the established chiefs who had traditionally sought influence through bribery. In...
Go to Profile#646
Andre Geim
#646
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#647
C. West Churchman
#647
Overall Influence
1913 - 2004 (91 years)
Charles West Churchman was an American philosopher and systems scientist, who was Professor at the School of Business Administration and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his pioneering work in operations research, system analysis and ethics.
Go to Profile#648
Zellig Harris
#648
Overall Influence
1909 - 1992 (83 years)
Zellig Sabbettai Harris was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language. These developments from the first 10 years of his career were published within the first 25. His contributions in the subsequent 35 years of his career include transfer grammar, string analysis , elementary sentence-differences , algebraic structures in language, operator grammar, sublanguage grammar, a theory...
Go to Profile#649
C. R. Rao
#649
Overall Influence
1920 - Present (104 years)
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao was an Indian-American mathematician and statistician. He was professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo. Rao was honoured by numerous colloquia, honorary degrees, and festschrifts and was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2002. The American Statistical Association has described him as "a living legend whose work has influenced not just statistics, but has had far reaching implications for fields as varied as economics, genetics, anthropology, geology, national planning, demography, biometry, a...
Go to Profile#650
Neil deGrasse Tyson
#650
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
