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
John Platt
#25561
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
John Carlton Platt is an American computer scientist. He is currently a distinguished scientist at Google. Formerly he was a deputy managing director at Microsoft Research Redmond Labs. Platt worked for Microsoft from 1997 to 2015. Before that, he served as director of research at Synaptics.
Go to Profile#602
Slava Turyshev
#25621
Overall Influence
Vyacheslav Gennadievich Turyshev is a Russian physicist now working in the US at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory . He is known for his investigations of the Pioneer anomaly, affecting Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft, and for his attempt to recover early data of the Pioneer spacecraft to shed light on such a phenomenon.
Go to Profile#603
Michael Cohen
#25644
Overall Influence
2000 - 2018 (18 years)
M. Michael Cohen Jr. was an American pathologist and geneticist who was Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University . He was the first doctor to diagnose Proteus syndrome, in 1979.
Go to Profile#604
Daniel G. Nocera
#25709
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Daniel George Nocera is an American chemist, currently the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 he was described as a "major force in the field of inorganic photochemistry and photophysics". Time magazine included him in its 2009 list of the 100 most influential people.
Go to Profile#605
John H. Seinfeld
#25807
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
John Hersh Seinfeld is an American chemical engineer and pioneering expert in atmospheric science. His research on air pollution has influenced public policy, and he developed the first mathematical model of air quality, which has influenced air pollution tracking and research across the United States. He has spent his career at the California Institute of Technology, where he is currently the Louis E. Nohl Professor of Chemical Engineering.
Go to Profile#606
Sean Eddy
#25808
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Sean Roberts Eddy is Professor of Molecular & Cellular Biology and of Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. Previously he was based at the Janelia Research Campus from 2006 to 2015 in Virginia. His research interests are in bioinformatics, computational biology and biological sequence analysis. projects include the use of Hidden Markov models in HMMER, Infernal Pfam and Rfam.
Go to Profile#607
Homayoun Seraji
#25859
Overall Influence
1947 - 2007 (60 years)
Homâyun Serâji was an Iranian scientist, engineer, a JPL senior researcher and former professor of Sharif University of Technology who published extensively in the field of multivariable control systems, focusing on optimal control, pole placement, multivariable PID controllers, and output regulation. Also he has significant publications in the field of Robotics, and space exploration.
Go to Profile#608
Sebastian von Hoerner
#25909
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Sebastian Rudolf Karl von Hoerner was a German astrophysicist and radio astronomer. He was born in Görlitz, Lower Silesia. During WW II, Von Hoerner served in the German Army on the Eastern Front. A bullet struck a pair of binoculars he was wearing on a strap around his neck, ricocheted up and blinded him in one eye. He was sent to Germany to recover and was there when the Front collapsed. After the end of World War II he studied physics at University of Göttingen. He obtained his doctorate at the same university in 1951 as Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. Together they conducted simulations that studied the formation of stars and globular clusters.
Go to Profile#609
Mohamed-Slim Alouini
#25930
Overall Influence
Mohamed-Slim Alouini is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology , Thuwal, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia. His research interests include the modeling, design, and performance analysis of wireless, satellite, and optical communication systems. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and OPTICA
Go to Profile#610
Kurt Mislow
#26022
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Kurt Martin Mislow was a German-born American organic chemist who specialized in stereochemistry. Born in Berlin on June 5, 1923, Mislow had moved to London by 1938, after some time in Milan. With the help of his uncle Alfred Eisenstaedt, Mislow's family left London for New York City in 1940. Mislow earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Tulane University in 1944, and received a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology, where he was supervised by Linus Pauling. Mislow first taught at New York University, then moved to Princeton University in 1964. While at Princeton, Mislow...
Go to Profile#611
David Conlon
#26025
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
David Conlon is an Irish mathematician who is a Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests are in Hungarian-style combinatorics, particularly Ramsey theory, extremal graph theory, combinatorial number theory, and probabilistic methods in combinatorics. He proved the first superpolynomial improvement on the Erdős–Szekeres bound on diagonal Ramsey numbers. He won the European Prize in Combinatorics in 2011 for his work in Ramsey theory and for his progress on Sidorenko's conjecture, and the Whitehead Prize in 2019.
Go to Profile#612
Michael Hochella
#26028
Overall Influence
Michael F. Hochella, Jr. is an American geoscientist and currently a university distinguished professor at Virginia Tech and a laboratory fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Royal Society of Chemistry, Geochemical Society, European Association of Geochemistry, Mineralogical Society of America, International Association of GeoChemistry, Geological Society of America and American Geophysical Union. His interests are nanogeoscience, minerals, biogeochemistry and geochemistry. Currently among greater than 22,...
Go to Profile#613
Fred Cummings
#26105
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Frederick W. Cummings was an American theoretical physicist and professor at the University of California, Riverside. He specialised in cavity quantum electrodynamics, many-body theory, non-linear dynamics, and biophysics.
Go to Profile#614
James J. Wynne
#26188
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
James J. Wynne is an American physicist at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. Wynne pioneered the use of excimer lasers for medical applications, most notably LASIK. He received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation on February 2, 2013, from U.S. President Obama, together with Rangaswamy Srinivasan and Samuel Blum for their contributions to laser eye surgery.
Go to Profile#615
Gordon J. F. MacDonald
#26308
Overall Influence
1929 - 2002 (73 years)
Gordon James Fraser MacDonald was an American geophysicist and environmental scientist, best known for his principled skepticism regarding continental drift , involvement in the development of the McNamara Line electronic defense barrier during the Vietnam War, and early research and advocacy on human-made global climate change. MacDonald was admired for his creative mind, and his ability to connect scientific issues and matters of public policy.
Go to Profile#616
Swapan K. Gayen
#26330
Overall Influence
Swapan Kumar Gayen is a Bengali-American physicist. He is a professor of physics at the City University of New York. Education and career Gayen was born in a Bengali family in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He completed his BSc and MSc in physics from the University of Dhaka in 1977. In 1984, he received his PhD in physics from the University of Connecticut. His thesis was titled Two-photon absorption spectroscopy of the trivalent cerium ion in calcium fluoride.
Go to Profile#617
Geraint F. Lewis
#26350
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Geraint Francis Lewis, FLSW is a Welsh astrophysicist, who is best known for his work on dark energy, gravitational lensing and galactic cannibalism. Lewis is a Professor of Astrophysics at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, part of the University of Sydney's School of Physics. He is head of the Gravitational Astrophysics Group. He was previously the Associate Head for Research at the School of Physics, and held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship between 2011 and 2015. Lewis won the 2016 Walter Boas Medal in recognition of excellence in research in Physics. In 2021, he was aw...
Go to Profile#618
William F. Martin
#26361
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
William Martin is an American botanist and microbiologist, currently Head of the Institut für Molekulare Evolution, Heinrich Heine Universität, Düsseldorf. Born in Bethesda, Maryland, Martin was educated at Richland College, Dallas, Texas, and Texas A&M University. After working as a carpenter in Dallas, Martin moved to Hannover, Germany, and obtained his university Diploma from Technische Universität Hannover in 1985. Martin's PhD is from Max-Planck-Institut für Züchtungsforschung, Cologne, where he did postdoctoral research, followed by further postdoctoral work at Institut für Genetik, Technische Universität Braunschweig, where he obtained his Habilitation in 1992.
Go to Profile#619
Yaser Abu-Mostafa
#26384
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Yaser Said Abu-Mostafa is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology, Chairman of Paraconic Technologies Ltd, and Chairman of Machine Learning Consultants LLC. He is known for his research and educational activities in the area of machine learning.
Go to Profile#620
Katie Bouman
#26435
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (37 years)
Katherine Louise Bouman is an American engineer and computer scientist working in the field of computer imagery. She led the development of an algorithm for imaging black holes, known as Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors , and was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team that captured the first image of a black hole.
Go to Profile#621
George W. Housner
#26442
Overall Influence
1910 - 2008 (98 years)
George W. Housner was a professor of earthquake engineering at the California Institute of Technology and National Medal of Science laureate. Biography Housner received his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Michigan where he was influenced by Stephen Timoshenko. He earned his masters' and doctoral degrees from the California Institute of Technology where he had been a professor of earthquake engineering from 1945 to 1981, and Professor Emeritus thereafter.
Go to Profile#622
Ruedi Aebersold
#26448
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Rudolf Aebersold is a Swiss biologist, regarded as a pioneer in the fields of proteomics and systems biology. He has primarily researched techniques for measuring proteins in complex samples, in many cases via mass spectrometry. Ruedi Aebersold is a professor of Systems biology at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology in ETH Zurich. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington, where he previously had a research group.
Go to Profile#623
William T. Miller
#26452
Overall Influence
1911 - 1998 (87 years)
William Taylor Miller was an American professor of organic chemistry at Cornell University. His experimental research included investigations into the mechanism of addition of halogens, especially fluorine, to hydrocarbons. His work focused primarily on the physical and chemical properties of fluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons, and the synthesis of novel electrophilic reagents.
Go to Profile#624
David Epel
#26486
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
David Epel is a researcher at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California, and a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. Epel earned his Ph.D. at University of California Berkeley under Daniel Mazia. He arrived at Hopkins Marine Station in 1965. Subsequently, Professor Epel spent seven years at University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He completed a postdoc with Britton Chance at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Epel has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
Go to Profile#625
Joseph Katz
#26502
Overall Influence
Joseph Katz is an Israel-born American fluid dynamicist, known for his work on experimental fluid mechanics, cavitation phenomena and multiphase flow, turbulence, turbomachinery flows and oceanography flows, flow-induced vibrations and noise, and development of optical flow diagnostics techniques, including Particle Image Velocimetry and Holographic Particle Image Velocimetry . As of 2005, he is the William F. Ward Sr. Distinguished Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Whiting School of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#626
Paul G. Richards
#26508
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Paul G. Richards is an English-born, American seismologist who has made fundamental contributions to the theory of seismic wave propagation and in methods to understand how the recorded shapes of seismic waves are affected by processes of diffraction, attenuation and scattering. He is the Mellon Professor of the Natural Sciences at Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
Go to Profile#627
Marc Davis
#26548
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Marc Davis is an American professor of astronomy and physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Davis received his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, his Ph.D from Princeton University in 1973 and has been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He taught for a year at Princeton, 1973–74, then was on the astronomy faculty at Harvard from 1975 to 1981. Since 1981, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California at Berkeley.
Go to Profile#628
Elmer G. Gilbert
#26554
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Elmer Grant Gilbert was an American aerospace engineer and a Professor Emeritus of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in Instrumentation Engineering from Michigan in 1957.
Go to Profile#629
David J. Stevenson
#26768
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
David John Stevenson is a professor of planetary science at Caltech. Originally from New Zealand, he received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in physics, where he proposed a model for the interior of Jupiter. He is well known for applying fluid mechanics and magnetohydrodynamics to understand the internal structure and evolution of planets and moons.
Go to Profile#630
Charles Sawyers
#26851
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Charles L. Sawyers is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator who holds the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center . HOPP is a program created in 2006 that comprises researchers from many disciplines to bridge clinical and laboratory discoveries.
Go to Profile#631
Ricky J. Sethi
#26913
Overall Influence
Ricky J. Sethi is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Fitchburg State University and the Director of Research for The Madsci Network. He was appointed as a National Science Foundation Computing Innovation Fellow by the Computing Community Consortium and the Computing Research Association. He has contributed significantly in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, social computing, and science education/eLearning.
Go to Profile#632
Matthias Flach
#26916
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Matthias Flach is a German mathematician, professor and former executive officer for mathematics at California Institute of Technology. Professional overview Research interests includes:Arithmetic algebraic geometry .Special values of L-functions.Conjectures of:BlochBeilinsonDeligneBloch–Kato conjecture .Galois module theory.Motivic cohomology.
Go to Profile#633
Jun Ye
#26985
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Jun Ye is a Chinese-American physicist at JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the University of Colorado Boulder, working primarily in the field of atomic, molecular and optical physics.
Go to Profile#634
Denis Rousseau
#27033
Overall Influence
Denis L. Rousseau is an American scientist. He is currently professor and university chairman of the department of physiology and biophysics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Biography Rousseau is professor and university chairman of physiology and biophysics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, of Yeshiva University, a position he has held since 1996. He received his B.A. from Bowdoin College and received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Princeton University. After holding a position as research associate in the physics department at the University of Southern California, ...
Go to Profile#635
Jim K. Omura
#27064
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Jimmy K. Omura is an electrical engineer and information theorist. Omura received his B.S. and M.S. from MIT, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in electrical engineering. He was a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA for 15 years. His notable work includes the design of a number of spread spectrum communications systems, and the Massey-Omura cryptosystem . With Andrew Viterbi he co-authored Principles of Digital Communication and Coding , a standard textbook in digital communications. He also co-authored the Spread Spectrum Communications Handbook .
Go to Profile#636
Horace W. Babcock
#27074
Overall Influence
1912 - 2003 (91 years)
Horace Welcome Babcock was an American astronomer. He was the son of Harold D. Babcock. Career Babcock invented and built a number of astronomical instruments, and in 1953 was the first to propose the idea of adaptive optics. He specialized in spectroscopy and the study of magnetic fields of stars. He proposed the Babcock Model, a theory for the magnetism of sunspots.
Go to Profile#637
Axel Scherer
#27129
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Axel Scherer is the Bernard Neches Professor of Electrical Engineering, Physics, and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He is also a distinguished visiting professor at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. He is known for fabricating the world's first semiconducting vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser at Bell Labs. In 2006, Scherer was named the director of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute. He graduated from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in 1985. At Caltech he teaches a very popular freshman lab course on semiconductor device fabrica...
Go to Profile#638
Joel Myerson
#27235
Overall Influence
1945 - 2021 (76 years)
Joel Myerson was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina. He edited many books about the works of such American literary figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman.
Go to Profile#639
Stephen Salant
#27456
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Stephen W. Salant is an economist who has done extensive research in applied microeconomics . His 1975 model of speculative attacks in the gold market was adapted by Paul Krugman and others to explain speculative attacks in foreign exchange markets. Hundreds of journal articles and books on financial speculative attacks followed.
Go to Profile#640
Laurent Itti
#27486
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Laurent Itti is a computational neuroscientist. He received his MS in image processing from the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Paris in 1994, and a PhD in computation and neural systems from Caltech in 2000. He is currently an associate professor of computer science, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where he has been since 2000.
Go to Profile#641
T. Bill Sutherland
#27508
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
T. Bill Sutherland is an American theoretical physicist, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Utah. He received his BA from Washington University in St. Louis and his PhD in 1968 while studying under Nobel laureate C. N. Yang at Stony Brook. He is best known for his work in statistical mechanics and quantum many body theory. Early in his career he solved the six vertex model and developed an exact solution in 1967, which he then followed with the eight vertex model in 1970. He completed his postdoctoral work at Berkeley in the 1969-1971 time frame where he became interested in inverse square potential many body interactions.
Go to Profile#642
Eldridge M. Moores
#27542
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Eldridge Moores was an American geologist. He specialized in the understanding of ophiolites and the geology of the continental crust of the Western United States and Tethyan belt, the geology of Greece, Cyprus, and Pakistan, and the tectonic development of the Sierra Nevada and the Alpine - Himalayan systems.
Go to Profile#643
Hal Finney
#27559
Overall Influence
1956 - 2014 (58 years)
Harold Thomas Finney II was an American software developer. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. Finney later worked for PGP Corporation. He also was an early bitcoin contributor and received the first bitcoin transaction from bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
Go to Profile#644
Anatol Roshko
#27573
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Anatol Roshko was a Canadian-born physicist and engineer. He was the Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. Roshko is known for his contributions to gas dynamics. He along with H. W. Liepmann is the co-author of the widely used textbook Elements of Gasdynamics. He has made research contributions to problems of separated flow; bluff-body aerodynamics; structure of turbulent shear flow.
Go to Profile#645
Bob Twiggs
#27691
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Robert J. Twiggs is an American professor of Astronautics and Space Science at Morehead State University. He is responsible, along with Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University, for co-inventing the CubeSat reference design for miniaturized satellites which became an Industry Standard for design and deployment of the satellites.
Go to Profile#646
Kwabena Boahen
#27700
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Kwabena Adu Boahen is a Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Education and early life Kwabena Boahen was born on September 22, 1964, in Accra, Ghana. He attended secondary school at Mfantsipim School in Cape Coast, Ghana, and at the Presbyterian Boys' Senior High School in Accra, Ghana. While at Mfantsipim, he invented the corn-planting machine that won the national science competition and graduated as the valedictorian of the Class of 1981. He received his B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering ...
Go to Profile#647
Jani Radebaugh
#27834
Overall Influence
Jani Radebaugh is an American planetary scientist and professor of geology at Brigham Young University who specializes in field studies of planets. Radebaugh's research focuses on Saturn's moon Titan, Jupiter's moon Io, the Earth's Moon, Mars and Pluto. Radebaugh is a Science Team member of the Dragonfly mission to Titan, the IVO Io mission proposal, and the Mars Median project. She was an Associate Team Member of the Cassini-Huygens RADAR instrument from 2008 to 2017, and was a graduate student scientist for Io for the Galileo mission. She does science outreach through her work as an expert ...
Go to Profile#648
Nicholas Turro
#27960
Overall Influence
1938 - 2012 (74 years)
Nicholas J. Turro was an American chemist, Wm. P. Schweitzer Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University. He was a world renowned organic chemist and leading world expert on organic photochemistry. He was the recipient of the 2011 Arthur C. Cope Award in Organic Chemistry, given annually "to recognize outstanding achievement in the field of organic chemistry, the significance of which has become apparent within the five years preceding the year in which the award will be considered." He was also the recipient of the 2000 Willard Gibbs Award, which recognizes "eminent chemists who...have ...
Go to Profile#649
Marcus Chown
#28006
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Marcus Chown is a science writer, journalist and broadcaster, currently cosmology consultant for New Scientist magazine. Biography He graduated from the Queen Mary University of London in 1980 with a Bachelor of Science in physics . In 1982 he graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a Master of Science in astrophysics. Chown studied under Richard Feynman at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#650
Michael Shulman
#28074
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Michael "Mike" Shulman is an American associate professor of mathematics at the University of San Diego who works in category theory and higher category theory, homotopy theory, logic as applied to set theory, and computer science.
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