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
#6001
Richard Kearney
#6009
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Richard Kearney is an Irish philosopher and public intellectual specializing in contemporary continental philosophy. He is the Charles Seelig Professor in Philosophy at Boston College and has taught at University College Dublin, the Sorbonne, the University of Nice, and the Australian Catholic University. He is the author of 23 books on European philosophy and literature and has edited or co-edited over 20 more. He was formerly a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, the Higher Education Authority of Ireland and chairman of the Irish School of Film at University College Dublin. He is also a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
Go to Profile#6002
Maurice de Gandillac
#6010
Overall Influence
1906 - 2006 (100 years)
Maurice de Gandillac was a French philosopher. He was born in Koléa, French Algeria and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. He wrote his thesis under Étienne Gilson on the Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa. In 1946 he was appointed professor in the history of medieval and Renaissance philosophy at the Sorbonne. He supervised the doctoral dissertations of numerous students, including Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.
Go to Profile#6003
Van Rensselaer Potter
#6011
Overall Influence
1911 - 2001 (90 years)
Van Rensselaer Potter II was an American biochemist, oncologist, and bioethicist. Born in northeast South Dakota, Potter was professor of oncology at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for more than five decades.
Go to Profile#6004
António Guterres
#6012
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres is a Portuguese politician and diplomat. Since 2017, he has served as secretary-general of the United Nations, the ninth person to hold this title. A member of the Portuguese Socialist Party, Guterres served as prime minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002.
Go to Profile#6005
Frank Mankiewicz
#6013
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Frank Fabian Mankiewicz II was an American journalist, political adviser, president of National Public Radio, and public relations executive. Life and career Frank Mankiewicz was born in New York City and grew up in Beverly Hills, California, the son of Sara and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, who co-wrote Citizen Kane. His uncle, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, directed such films as All About Eve and Cleopatra. His brother was television writer Don Mankiewicz. They grew up near the Marx Brothers, and Harpo Marx was a presence at Mankiewicz family Passover Seders. "He would pick up the Paschal la...
Go to Profile#6006
Stanley Rosen
#6014
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Stanley Rosen was Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy and Professor Emeritus at Boston University. His research and teaching focused on the fundamental questions of philosophy and on the most important figures of its history, from Plato to Heidegger.
Go to Profile#6007
Richard Stanley Peters
#6015
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Richard Stanley Peters was an English philosopher. His work belongs mainly to the areas of political theory, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of education. Earlier life Peters was born in 1919 in Mussoorie, India. He spent his childhood with his grandmother in England. He was a pupil at Sidcot School, Winscombe, Somerset, 1933–1938. As a young man, his private tutor was Eric Blair . As a conscientious objector in the Second World War, he served in the Friends Ambulance Unit and with the Friends Relief Service in 1940–1944.
Go to Profile#6008
Ronald C. Kessler
#6016
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ronald C. Kessler is an American professor at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on the precision treatment of mental illness to determine the appropriate intervention for specific patients. He ranks among the most highly cited researchers in the world, with an h-index of 329 as of September 2023.
Go to Profile#6009
Hubert Zimmermann
#6017
Overall Influence
1941 - 2012 (71 years)
Hubert Zimmermann was a French software engineer and a pioneer of computer networking. Biography Zimmermann was educated at École Polytechnique and École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications.
Go to Profile#6010
Nolan Ryan
#6018
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Lynn Nolan Ryan Jr. , nicknamed "the Ryan Express", is an American former professional baseball pitcher and sports executive. Over a record 27-year playing career in Major League Baseball , Ryan pitched for the New York Mets, California Angels, Houston Astros, and Texas Rangers. After his retirement in 1993, Ryan served as chief executive officer of the Texas Rangers and an executive advisor to the Houston Astros. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1999, and is widely considered to be one of the greatest MLB pitchers of all time. Ryan was a right-handed pitcher who consistently threw pitches that were clocked above 100 miles per hour .
Go to Profile#6011
Samuel Brittan
#6019
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Sir Samuel Brittan was an English journalist and author. He was the first economics correspondent for the Financial Times, and later a long-time columnist. He was a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Go to Profile#6012
Diane di Prima
#6020
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Diane di Prima was an American poet, known for her association with the Beat movement. She was also an artist, prose writer, and teacher. Her magnum opus is widely considered to be Loba, a collection of poems first published in 1978 then extended in 1998.
Go to Profile#6013
Gigi Hadid
#6021
Overall Influence
1995 - Present (31 years)
Jelena Noura "Gigi" Hadid is an American model and television personality. In 2016, she was named International Model of the Year by the British Fashion Council. Throughout her whole career, Hadid has made 45 appearances in international Vogue. Models.com ranks Hadid as one of the "New Supers". Since 2017, Hadid has been one of the highest paid models in the world earning $20 million.
Go to Profile#6014
Robert Satcher
#6022
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Robert Lee "Bobby" Satcher Jr. is an American orthopedic surgeon, chemical engineer, and former NASA astronaut. He participated in 2 spacewalks during STS-129, accumulating 12hrs 19min of EVA time. Satcher holds two doctorates and has received numerous awards and honors as a surgeon and engineer.
Go to Profile#6015
Wang Gungwu
#6023
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Wang Gungwu, is an Australian historian, sinologist, and writer specialising in the history of China and Southeast Asia. He has studied and written about the Chinese diaspora, but he has objected to the use of the word diaspora to describe the migration of Chinese from China because both it mistakenly implies that all overseas Chinese are the same and has been used to perpetuate fears of a "Chinese threat", under the control of the Chinese government. An expert on the Chinese tianxia concept, he was the first to suggest its application to the contemporary world as an American Tianxia.
Go to Profile#6016
James Lepowsky
#6024
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
James Lepowsky is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Previously he taught at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 where his advisors were Bertram Kostant and Sigurdur Helgason. Lepowsky graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1961, 16 years after Kostant. His current research is in the areas of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras and vertex algebras. He has written several books on vertex algebras and related topics. In 1988, in a joint work with Igor Frenkel and Arne Meurman, he constructed the monster vertex algebra .
Go to Profile#6017
Steve Zahn
#6025
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Steven James Zahn is an American actor. His film roles include Reality Bites , Stuart Little , Shattered Glass , Sahara , Chicken Little , the Diary of a Wimpy Kid trilogy , Dallas Buyers Club , The Good Dinosaur , and War for the Planet of the Apes . On television, Zahn appeared as Davis McAlary on HBO's Treme , and as Mark Mossbacher in the first season of the HBO satire comedy miniseries The White Lotus , for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. Zahn won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporti...
Go to Profile#6018
David Bellos
#6026
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David Bellos is an English-born translator and biographer. Bellos is Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University in the United States. He was director of Princeton's Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication from its inception in 2007 until July 1, 2019.
Go to Profile#6019
Paul De Grauwe
#6027
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Paul De Grauwe is a Belgian economist and John Paulson Professor in European Political Economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science as head of the European Institute. He is also professor emeritus in international economics at KU Leuven and former member of the Belgian Federal Parliament.
Go to Profile#6020
Ben Fine
#6028
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Ben Fine is Professor of Economics at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. Background Fine was born in Coventry in 1948. One of six brothers, he and all but one other followed their father and studied mathematics at the University of Oxford. Fine graduated at the age of 20, and then was recruited by Sir James Mirrlees, completing an economics degree. He took his doctorate in economics at the London School of Economics, under the supervision of Amartya Sen, in 1974. He moved to the newly established economics department at Birkbeck, University of London, later working part-time as an industrial economist at the Greater London Council prior to its abolition.
Go to Profile#6021
Richard Danzig
#6029
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Richard Jeffrey Danzig is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 71st Secretary of the Navy under President Bill Clinton. He served as an advisor of the President Barack Obama during his presidential campaign and was later the chairman of the national security think-tank, the Center for a New American Security.
Go to Profile#6022
Sahotra Sarkar
#6030
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Sahotra Sarkar is an Indian-American professor at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the philosophy of biology. Education and career Sarkar is originally from India where he lived in Darjeeling until 1975. He earned a BA from Columbia University, where he won a Van Amringe Mathematical Prize, and a MA and PhD from the University of Chicago where he worked with William_C._Wimsatt. He was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin , the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology , and the Edelstein Centre for the Philosophy of Science . He was a visiting schol...
Go to Profile#6023
James Taylor
#6031
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
James Vernon Taylor is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. A six-time Grammy Award winner, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. Taylor is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 100 million records worldwide.
Go to Profile#6024
Queen Máxima of the Netherlands
#6032
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Máxima is Queen of the Netherlands as the wife of King Willem-Alexander. Argentine by birth, she worked in marketing when she met Willem-Alexander, eldest son and heir apparent of Queen Beatrix, in 1999. They married in 2002, and became king and queen on the abdication of her mother-in-law on 30 April 2013. Máxima has promoted social integration of immigrants, LGBT rights, and financial inclusion. She and Willem-Alexander have three daughters, Princesses Catharina-Amalia, Alexia, and Ariane, who are first, second, and third, respectively, in the line of succession.
Go to Profile#6025
Alan Garner
#6033
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Alan Garner is an English novelist best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. Much of his work is rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.
Go to Profile#6026
Bob Moses
#6034
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Robert Parris Moses was an American educator and civil rights activist known for his work as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on voter education and registration in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement, and his co-founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. As part of his work with the Council of Federated Organizations , a coalition of the Mississippi branches of the four major civil rights organizations , he was the main organizer for the Freedom Summer Project.
Go to Profile#6027
Barbara Kopple
#6035
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Barbara Kopple is an American film director known primarily for her documentary work. She is credited with pioneering a renaissance of cinema vérité, and bringing the historic french style to a modern American audience. She has won two Academy Awards, for Harlan County, USA , about a Kentucky miners' strike,[1] and for American Dream , the story of the 1985–86 Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota.[2] Consequently, she is the first woman to have won twice in the Oscars' Best Documentary category.
Go to Profile#6028
Lee Child
#6036
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
James Dover Grant , primarily known by his pen name Lee Child, is a British author who writes thriller novels, and is best known for his Jack Reacher novel series. The books follow the adventures of a former American military policeman, Jack Reacher, who wanders the United States. His first novel, Killing Floor , won both the Anthony Award and the 1998 Barry Award for Best First Novel.
Go to Profile#6029
Valentino Braitenberg
#6037
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Valentino Braitenberg was an Italian neuroscientist and cyberneticist. He was former director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. His book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology became famous in Robotics and among Psychologists, in which he described how hypothetical analog vehicles , though simple in design, can exhibit behaviors akin to aggression, love, foresight, and optimism. These have come to be known as Braitenberg vehicles. His pioneering scientific work was concerned with the relation between structures and functions of the brain.
Go to Profile#6030
Enrique Leff
#6038
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Enrique Leff is a Mexican economist, environmental sociologist and environmentalist. He has written 25 books and 180 articles on political ecology, environmental sociology, environmental economics, environmental epistemology and environmental education. He is regarded as one of the key environmental thinkers in Latin America.
Go to Profile#6031
Richard Jozsa
#6039
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Richard Jozsa is an Australian mathematician who holds the Leigh Trapnell Chair in Quantum Physics at the University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where his research investigates quantum information science. A pioneer of his field, he is the co-author of the Deutsch–Jozsa algorithm and one of the co-inventors of quantum teleportation.
Go to Profile#6032
Aseem Shukla
#6040
Overall Influence
Aseem Ravindra Shukla is the Director of Minimally Invasive Surgery in the Department of Urology at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, PA and is a Professor of Surgery at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Shukla is the co-founder and board member of the Hindu American Foundation.
Go to Profile#6033
Elgin Baylor
#6041
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Elgin Gay Baylor was an American professional basketball player, coach, and executive. He played 14 seasons as a forward in the National Basketball Association for the Minneapolis/Los Angeles Lakers. Baylor was a gifted shooter, a strong rebounder, and an accomplished passer, who was best known for his trademark hanging jump shot. The No. 1 draft pick in 1958, NBA Rookie of the Year in 1959, 11-time NBA All-Star, and a 10-time member of the All-NBA first team, Baylor is regarded as one of the game's all-time greatest players. In 1977, Baylor was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#6034
Wolfram Burgard
#6042
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Wolfram Burgard is a German roboticist. He is a full professor at the University of Technology Nuremberg where he heads the Laboratory for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. He is known for his substantial contributions to the simultaneous localization and mapping problem as well as diverse other contributions to robotics.
Go to Profile#6035
Susan Stroman
#6043
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Susan P. Stroman is an American theatre director, choreographer, film director and performer. Her notable theater productions include Oklahoma!, The Music Man, Crazy for You, Contact, The Producers, The Frogs, The Scottsboro Boys, Bullets Over Broadway, POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, and New York, New York.
Go to Profile#6036
Rémi Després
#6044
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Rémi Després is a French engineer and entrepreneur known for his contributions on data networking. Education In 1961–1963, Rémi Després attended École Polytechnique of Paris, of which he holds an Engineer degree.
Go to Profile#6037
Terry Venables
#6045
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Terence Frederick Venables , often referred to as El Tel, was an English football player and manager who played for clubs including Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and Queens Park Rangers and won two caps for England.
Go to Profile#6038
Adrian Bejan
#6046
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Adrian Bejan is a Romanian-American professor who has made contributions to modern thermodynamics and developed his constructal law. He is J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University and author of the books Design in Nature, The Physics of Life , Freedom and Evolution and Time And Beauty: Why Time Flies And Beauty Never Dies
Go to Profile#6039
Sheikh Hasina
#6047
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sheikh Hasina Wazed is a Bangladeshi politician who has served as the tenth Prime Minister of Bangladesh since January 2009. Hasina was among Time's 100 most influential people in the world in 2018.
Go to Profile#6040
Edward E. Jones
#6048
Overall Influence
1927 - 1993 (66 years)
For the Louisiana civil rights pioneer, see E. Edward Jones. Edward Ellsworth "Ned" Jones was an influential American social psychologist, he is known as father of Ingratiation due to his major works in the area. He worked at Duke University and from 1977 at Princeton University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Jones as the 39th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#6041
Karl E. Case
#6049
Overall Influence
1946 - 2016 (70 years)
Karl Edwin "Chip" Case was professor of economics emeritus at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States, where he held the Coman and Hepburn Chair in Economics and taught for 34 years. He was a senior fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University and was president of the Boston Economic Club 2011-12. Case was also a founding partner in the real estate research firm of Fiserv Case Shiller Weiss, Inc., which created the S&P Case Shiller Index of home prices. He served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Depositors Insurance Fund of Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#6042
Heinz Maier-Leibnitz
#6050
Overall Influence
1911 - 2000 (89 years)
Heinz Maier-Leibnitz was a German physicist. He made contributions to nuclear spectroscopy, coincidence measurement techniques, radioactive tracers for biochemistry and medicine, and neutron optics. He was an influential educator and an advisor to the Federal Republic of Germany on nuclear programs.
Go to Profile#6043
Gustave Choquet
#6051
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Gustave Choquet was a French mathematician. Choquet was born in Solesmes, Nord. His contributions include work in functional analysis, potential theory, topology and measure theory. He is known for creating the Choquet theory, the Choquet integral and the theory of capacities.
Go to Profile#6044
Larry Diamond
#6052
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Larry Jay Diamond is an American political sociologist and leading contemporary scholar in the field of democracy studies. Diamond is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University's main center for research on international issues. At the Institute Diamond served as the director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law from 2009-2016. He was succeeded in that role by Francis Fukuyama and then Kathryn Stoner.
Go to Profile#6045
Oscar Handlin
#6053
Overall Influence
1915 - 2011 (96 years)
Oscar Handlin was an American historian. As a professor of history at Harvard University for over 50 years, he directed 80 PhD dissertations and helped promote social and ethnic history, virtually inventing the field of immigration history in the 1950s. Handlin won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Uprooted . Handlin's 1965 testimony before Congress was said to "have played an important role" in passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that abolished the discriminatory immigration quota system in the US.
Go to Profile#6046
Ronald Hamowy
#6054
Overall Influence
1937 - 2012 (75 years)
Ronald Hamowy was a Canadian academic, known primarily for his contributions to political and social academic fields. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus of intellectual history at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Hamowy was closely associated with the political ideology of libertarianism and his writings and scholarship place particular emphasis on individual liberty and the limits of state action in a free society. He is associated with a number of prominent American libertarian organizations.
Go to Profile#6047
Frank Furedi
#6055
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Frank Furedi is a Hungarian-Canadian academic and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent. He is well known for his work on sociology of fear, education, therapy culture, paranoid parenting and sociology of knowledge.
Go to Profile#6048
Dan Schulman
#6056
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Daniel H. Schulman is an American business executive. He is president and CEO of PayPal, formerly serving as group president of enterprise growth at American Express. Schulman was responsible for American Express' global strategy to expand alternative mobile and online payment services, form new partnerships, and build revenue streams beyond the traditional card and travel businesses. Earlier, he served as president of Sprint's prepaid group and the founding CEO of Virgin Mobile.
Go to Profile#6049
Robert Manne
#6057
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert Michael Manne is an Emeritus Professor of politics and Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is a leading Australian public intellectual. Background Robert Manne was born in Melbourne to parents who were Jewish refugees from Europe. His earliest political consciousness was shaped by this fact and that both sets of grandparents were victims of The Holocaust. He was educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford . He joined La Trobe University in Melbourne in its early years. He served there as a professor in politics and culture until retirement in 2012.
Go to Profile#6050
Spider Robinson
#6058
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Spider Robinson is an American-born Canadian science fiction author. He has won a number of awards for his hard science fiction and humorous stories, including the Hugo Award 1977 and 1983, and another Hugo with his co-author and wife Jeanne Robinson in 1978.
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