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
#6051
Jayati Ghosh
#6059
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jayati Ghosh is an Indian development economist. She is the Chairperson of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and her core areas of study include international economics, employment patterns in developing countries, macroeconomic policy, and issues related to gender and development.
Go to Profile#6052
Andrea Camilleri
#6060
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Andrea Calogero Camilleri was an Italian writer. Biography Originally from Porto Empedocle, Girgenti, Sicily, Camilleri began university studies in the Faculty of Literature at the University of Palermo, but did not complete his degree; during that time he published poems and short stories.
Go to Profile#6053
Jaroslav Vaněk
#6061
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Jaroslav Vaněk was a Czech American economist and professor emeritus of Cornell University known for his research on economics of participation and, in his earlier career, on the theory of international trade.
Go to Profile#6054
Stan Wawrinka
#6062
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Stanislas Wawrinka is a Swiss professional tennis player. He reached a career-high Association of Tennis Professionals singles ranking of world No. 3 for the first time on 27 January 2014. His career highlights include three Grand Slam titles, those being the 2014 Australian Open, 2015 French Open and 2016 US Open, where he defeated the world No. 1 player in the final on all three occasions. Other achievements include reaching the final of the 2017 French Open, winning an ATP Tour Masters 1000 title at the 2014 Monte-Carlo Masters, and reaching three other Masters finals . Representing Swit...
Go to Profile#6055
Paul Lester
#6063
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Paul Lester is a British music journalist, author and broadcaster from Elstree, North London. Career He began his career as a freelance journalist, for Melody Maker in the early 1990s, as well as City Limits, 20/20, Sky Magazine and The Jewish Chronicle. He covered grunge, shoegaze, Madchester and Britpop, also spending time with bands touring the UK and internationally.
Go to Profile#6056
Richard L. Nolan
#6064
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Richard L. Nolan is an American business theorist, and Emeritus Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Biography Nolan received his BA Production and Operations Research in various positions, including the Philip Condit Chair of Management at University of Washington and the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration emeritus at Harvard Business School. A founder of consulting firm Nolan, Norton & Co. , he contributed a great deal to the thinking on the role of IT in transforming organisations and markets. He was conferred a Ph.D. in Operatio...
Go to Profile#6057
Ivar Ekeland
#6065
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Ivar I. Ekeland is a French mathematician of Norwegian descent. Ekeland has written influential monographs and textbooks on nonlinear functional analysis, the calculus of variations, and mathematical economics, as well as popular books on mathematics, which have been published in French, English, and other languages. Ekeland is known as the author of Ekeland's variational principle and for his use of the Shapley–Folkman lemma in optimization theory. He has contributed to the periodic solutions of Hamiltonian systems and particularly to the theory of Kreĭn indices for linear systems . Ekeland ...
Go to Profile#6058
Zlatan Ibrahimović
#6066
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Zlatan Ibrahimović is a Swedish former professional footballer who played as a striker. Ibrahimović is renowned for his acrobatic strikes and volleys, technique and ball control, as well as his physical dominance. He is regarded as one of the greatest strikers of all time and is one of the most decorated footballers in the world, having won 34 trophies in his career. He has scored over 570 career goals, including more than 500 club goals, and has scored in each of the last four decades.
Go to Profile#6059
Maxime Rodinson
#6067
Overall Influence
1915 - 2004 (89 years)
Maxime Rodinson was a French historian and sociologist. Ideologically a Marxist, Rodinson was a prominent authority oriental studies. He was the son of a Russian-Polish clothing trader and his wife, who both were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. After studying oriental languages, he became a professor of Ge'ez at the École pratique des hautes études. He was the author of a body of work, including the book Muhammad, a biography of the prophet of Islam.
Go to Profile#6060
Nicola Cabibbo
#6068
Overall Influence
1935 - 2010 (75 years)
Nicola Cabibbo was an Italian physicist, best known for his work on the weak interaction. Life Cabibbo, son of a Sicilian lawyer, was born in Rome. He graduated in theoretical physics at the Università di Roma "Sapienza University of Rome" in 1958 under the supervision of Bruno Touschek. In 1963, while working at CERN, Cabibbo found the solution to the puzzle of the weak decays of strange particles, formulating what came to be known as Cabibbo universality. In 1967 Nicola settled back in Rome where he taught theoretical physics and created a large school. He was president of the INFN from 1983 to 1992, during which time the Gran Sasso Laboratory was inaugurated.
Go to Profile#6061
Shirley M. Tilghman
#6069
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Shirley Marie Tilghman, is a Canadian scholar in molecular biology and an academic administrator. She is now a professor of molecular biology and public policy and president emerita of Princeton University. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.
Go to Profile#6062
John Szarkowski
#6070
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Thaddeus John Szarkowski was an American photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art . Early life and career He was born and grew up in the small northern Wisconsin city of Ashland, and became interested in photography at age eleven. In World War II Szarkowski served in the U.S. Army, after which he graduated in 1947 in art history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He then began his career as a museum photographer at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Go to Profile#6063
Stan Winston
#6071
Overall Influence
1946 - 2008 (62 years)
Stanley Winston was an American television and film special make-up effects creator, best known for his work in the Terminator series, the first three Jurassic Park films, Aliens, The Thing, the first two Predator films, Inspector Gadget, Iron Man, and Edward Scissorhands. He won four Academy Awards for his work.
Go to Profile#6064
Chris Whitty
#6072
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Sir Christopher John MacRae Whitty is a British epidemiologist, serving as Chief Medical Officer for England and Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government since 2019. Whitty was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department of Health and Social Care and Head of the National Institute for Health and Care Research from 2016 to 2021. He was also the Acting Government Chief Scientific Adviser from 2017 to 2018. He is emeritus Gresham Professor of Physic.
Go to Profile#6065
Aharon Appelfeld
#6073
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Aharon Appelfeld was an Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor. Biography Ervin Appelfeld was born in Jadova Commune, Storojineț County, in the Bukovina region of the Kingdom of Romania, now Ukraine. In an interview with the literary scholar, Nili Gold, in 2011, he remembered his home town in this district, Czernowitz, as "a very beautiful" place, full of schools and with two Latin gymnasiums, where fifty to sixty percent of the population was Jewish. In 1941, when he was nine years old, the Romanian Army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet occupation and his mother was murdered. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a forced labor camp in Romanian-controlled Transnistria.
Go to Profile#6066
Svetlana Alexievich
#6074
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich is a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian who writes in Russian. She was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time". She is the first writer from Belarus to receive the award.
Go to Profile#6067
Francine Prose
#6075
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Francine Prose is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She is a visiting professor of literature at Bard College, and was formerly president of PEN American Center. Life and career Born in Brooklyn, Prose graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968. She received the PEN Translation Prize in 1988 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991. Prose's novel The Glorious Ones has been adapted into a musical with the same title by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall of 2007.
Go to Profile#6068
Jean-Pierre Sauvage
#6076
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
#6069
Barry Cunliffe
#6077
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Sir Barrington Windsor Cunliffe, , known as Barry Cunliffe, is a British archaeologist and academic. He was Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 2007. Since 2007, he has been an emeritus professor.
Go to Profile#6070
Kathryn Sikkink
#6078
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Kathryn Sikkink is an author, human rights academic, and scholar of international relations working primarily through the theoretical strain of constructivism. She is currently a professor at Harvard Kennedy School.
Go to Profile#6071
Thomas J. Wilson
#6079
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Thomas J. Wilson is chairman, chief executive officer, and president of The Allstate Corporation. Wilson is also a member of the corporation's board of directors. Early life Wilson was born in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. He graduated from Lake Shore High School in 1975. He subsequently earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Michigan and later earned an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in 1980.
Go to Profile#6072
Cindy Sheehan
#6080
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Cindy Lee Sheehan is an American anti-war activist, whose son, U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, was killed by enemy action during the Iraq War. She attracted national and international media attention in August 2005 for her extended antiwar protest at a makeshift camp outside President George W. Bush's Texas ranch—a stand that drew both passionate support and criticism. Sheehan ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2008. She was a vocal critic of President Barack Obama's foreign policy. Her memoir, Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to Activism, was published in 2006. In an interview with The Daily Beast in 2017, Sheehan continued to hold her critical views towards George W.
Go to Profile#6073
Bart Kosko
#6081
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Bart Andrew Kosko is a writer and professor of electrical engineering and law at the University of Southern California . He is a researcher and popularizer of fuzzy logic, neural networks, and noise, and the author of several trade books and textbooks on these and related subjects of machine intelligence. He was awarded the 2022 Donald O. Hebb Award for neural learning by the International Neural Network Society.
Go to Profile#6074
Halil İnalcık
#6082
Overall Influence
1916 - 2016 (100 years)
Halil İnalcık was a Turkish historian. His highly influential research centered on social and economic approaches to the Ottoman Empire. His academic career started at Ankara University, where he completed his PhD and worked between 1940 and 1972. Between 1972 and 1986 he taught Ottoman history at the University of Chicago. From 1994 on he taught at Bilkent University, where he founded the history department. He was a founding member of Eurasian Academy.
Go to Profile#6075
David Ellerman
#6083
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
David Patterson Ellerman is a philosopher and author who works in the fields of economics and political economy, social theory and philosophy, quantum mechanics, and in mathematics. He has written extensively on workplace democracy based on a modern treatment of the labor theory of property and the theory of inalienable rights as rights based on de facto inalienable capacities.
Go to Profile#6076
Artie Lange
#6084
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Arthur Steven Lange Jr. is an American stand-up comedian, actor, and radio personality best known for his tenures on the sketch comedy series Mad TV from 1995 to 1997 and The Howard Stern Show from 2001 to 2009. Raised in New Jersey, Lange first worked as a longshoreman and taxi driver to help support his family, following the death of his quadriplegic father. He debuted as a stand-up comic in 1987 and took up the profession full-time five years later, developing his act on the New York City club circuit.
Go to Profile#6077
Jordi Galí
#6085
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jordi Galí is a Spanish macroeconomist who is regarded as one of the main figures in New Keynesian macroeconomics today. He is currently the director of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a Research Professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. After obtaining his doctorate from MIT in 1989 under the supervision of Olivier Blanchard, he held faculty positions at Columbia University and New York University before moving to Barcelona.
Go to Profile#6078
Laura Nader
#6086
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Laura Nader is an American anthropologist. She has been a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley since 1960. She was the first woman to receive a tenure-track position in the department. She is also the older sister of U.S. activist, consumer advocate, and frequent third-party candidate Ralph Nader, and the younger sister of community advocate Shafeek Nader and social scientist Claire Nader.
Go to Profile#6079
Harry Caray
#6087
Overall Influence
1914 - 1998 (84 years)
Harry Christopher Caray was an American radio and television sportscaster. During his career he called the play-by-play for five Major League Baseball teams, beginning with 25 years of calling the games of the St. Louis Cardinals . After a year working for the Oakland Athletics and 11 years with the Chicago White Sox, Caray spent the last 16 years of his career as the announcer for the Chicago Cubs.
Go to Profile#6080
Byung-Chul Han
#6088
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean-born philosopher and cultural theorist living in Germany. He was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and still occasionally gives courses there. Biography Byung-Chul Han studied metallurgy at Korea University in Seoul before he moved to Germany in the 1980s to study philosophy, German literature and Catholic theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich. In 1994 he received his doctoral degree at Freiburg with a dissertation on Stimmung, or mood, in Martin Heidegger.
Go to Profile#6081
Dipak C. Jain
#6089
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Dipak Chand Jain is Co-President and Global Advisor of China Europe International Business School. He previously was the Director of Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. The announcement of his appointment as Director of Sasin was made on 7 June 2014. He stepped down in 2017.
Go to Profile#6082
Anil Nerode
#6090
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Anil Nerode is an American mathematician, known for his work in mathematical logic and for his many-decades tenure as a professor at Cornell University. He received his undergraduate education and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, the latter under the directions of Saunders Mac Lane. He enrolled in the Hutchins College at the University of Chicago in 1947 at the age of 15, and received his Ph.D. in 1956. His Ph.D. thesis was on an algebraic abstract formulation of substitution in many-sorted free algebrass and its relation to equational definitions of the partial recursi...
Go to Profile#6083
Jack Sarfatti
#6091
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Jack Sarfatti is an American theoretical physicist. Working largely outside academia, most of Sarfatti's publications revolve around quantum physics and consciousness. Sarfatti was a leading member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, an informal group of physicists in California in the 1970s who, according to historian of science David Kaiser, aimed to inspire some of the investigations into quantum physics that underlie parts of quantum information science. Sarfatti co-wrote Space-Time and Beyond and has self-published several books.
Go to Profile#6084
Peter Cathcart Wason
#6092
Overall Influence
1924 - 2003 (79 years)
Peter Cathcart Wason was a cognitive psychologist at University College, London, who pioneered the psychology of reasoning. He sought to explain why people consistently commit logical errors. He designed problems and tests to demonstrate these behaviours, such as the Wason selection task, the THOG problem and the 2-4-6 problem. He also coined the term "confirmation bias" to describe the tendency for people to immediately favor information that validates their preconceptions, hypotheses and personal beliefs regardless of whether they are true or not.
Go to Profile#6085
Philippe Flajolet
#6093
Overall Influence
1948 - 2011 (63 years)
Philippe Flajolet was a French computer scientist. Biography A former student of École Polytechnique, Philippe Flajolet received his PhD in computer science from University Paris Diderot in 1973 and state doctorate from Paris-Sud 11 University in 1979. Most of Philippe Flajolet's research work was dedicated towards general methods for analyzing the computational complexity of algorithms, including the theory of average-case complexity. He introduced the theory of analytic combinatorics. With Robert Sedgewick of Princeton University, he wrote the first book-length treatment of the topic, the 2009 book entitled Analytic Combinatorics.
Go to Profile#6086
Debbie Rowe
#6094
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Deborah Jeanne Rowe is the ex-wife of pop musician Michael Jackson, with whom she had two children. She lives in Palmdale, California. Early life Debbie Rowe was born on December 6, 1958 in Spokane, Washington to Barbara Chilcutt and Gordon Rowe. Her father divorced her mother a few weeks before her second birthday. She was raised by her mother, a few aunts, and her maternal grandmother.
Go to Profile#6087
Norman Naimark
#6095
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Norman M. Naimark is an American historian. He is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of Eastern European Studies at Stanford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He writes on modern Eastern European history, genocide, and ethnic cleansing in the region.
Go to Profile#6088
Sally Mann
#6096
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Sally Mann HonFRPS is an American photographer known for making large format black and white photographs of her immediate surroundings—her children, husband, rural landscapes, and self-portraits. Early life and education Born in Lexington, Virginia, Mann was the third of three children. Her father, Robert S. Munger, was a general practitioner, and her mother, Elizabeth Evans Munger, ran the bookstore at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Mann was introduced to photography by her father, who encouraged her interest in photography; his 5x7 camera became the basis of her use of large format cameras today.
Go to Profile#6089
Ronald Breslow
#6097
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Ronald Charles David Breslow was an American chemist from Rahway, New Jersey. He was University Professor at Columbia University, where he was based in the Department of Chemistry and affiliated with the Departments of Biological Sciences and Pharmacology; he had also been on the faculty of its Department of Chemical Engineering. He had taught at Columbia since 1956 and was a former chair of the university's chemistry department.
Go to Profile#6090
Jerry Rice
#6098
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jerry Lee Rice is an American former professional football player who was a wide receiver for 20 seasons in the National Football League . He won three Super Bowl titles with the San Francisco 49ers before two shorter stints at the end of his career with the Oakland Raiders and Seattle Seahawks. Nicknamed "World" because of his superb catching ability, his accomplishments and numerous records, Rice is widely regarded as the greatest wide receiver of all time and one of the greatest players in NFL history. His biography on the official Pro Football Hall of Fame website names him: "the most prolific wide receiver in NFL history with staggering career totals".
Go to Profile#6091
Gérard Huet
#6099
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Gérard Pierre Huet is a French computer scientist, linguist and mathematician. He is senior research director at INRIA and mostly known for his major and seminal contributions to type theory, programming language theory and to the theory of computation.
Go to Profile#6092
Jonathan Spence
#6101
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
#6093
Michael Berenbaum
#6102
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Michael Berenbaum is an American scholar, professor, rabbi, writer, and filmmaker, who specializes in the study of the Holocaust. He served as deputy director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust , Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , and Director of the USHMM's Holocaust Research Institute .
Go to Profile#6094
Katharine Viner
#6103
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Katharine Sophie Viner is a British journalist and playwright. She became the first female editor-in-chief at The Guardian on 1 June 2015, succeeding Alan Rusbridger. Viner previously headed The Guardians web operations in Australia and the United States, before being selected for the editor-in-chief's position.
Go to Profile#6095
Christian B. Anfinsen
#6104
Overall Influence
1916 - 1995 (79 years)
Christian Boehmer Anfinsen Jr. was an American biochemist. He shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Stanford Moore and William Howard Stein for work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active conformation .
Go to Profile#6096
David P. Reed
#6105
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
David Patrick Reed is an American computer scientist, educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for a number of significant contributions to computer networking and wireless communications networks.
Go to Profile#6097
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat
#6106
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (103 years)
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat is a French mathematician and physicist. She has made seminal contributions to the study of Einstein's general theory of relativity, by showing that the Einstein equations can be put into the form of an initial value problem which is well-posed. In 2015, her breakthrough paper was listed by the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity as one of thirteen 'milestone' results in the study of general relativity, across the hundred years in which it had been studied.
Go to Profile#6098
Carl F. H. Henry
#6107
Overall Influence
1913 - 2003 (90 years)
Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry was an American evangelical Christian theologian who provided intellectual and institutional leadership to the neo-evangelical movement in the mid-to-late 20th century. He was ordained in 1942 after graduating from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary and went on to teach and lecture at various schools and publish and edit many works surrounding the neo-evangelical movement. His early book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism , was influential in calling evangelicals to differentiate themselves from separatist fundamentalism and claim a role in influencing the wider American culture.
Go to Profile#6099
James Ax
#6108
Overall Influence
1937 - 2006 (69 years)
James Burton Ax was an American mathematician who made groundbreaking contributions in algebra and number theory using model theory. He shared, with Simon B. Kochen, the seventh Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory, which was awarded for a series of three joint papers on Diophantine problems.
Go to Profile#6100
Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy
#6109
Overall Influence
1920 - 2007 (87 years)
Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy was a Hungarian-American psychiatrist and one of the founders of the field of family therapy. Born Iván Nagy, his family name was changed to Böszörményi-Nagy during his childhood. He emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1950, and he simplified his name to Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy at the time of his naturalization as a US citizen.
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