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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#6101
Matt Damon
#6110
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Matthew Paige Damon is an American actor, film producer, and screenwriter. Ranked among Forbes most bankable stars, the films in which he has appeared have collectively earned over $3.88 billion at the North American box office, making him one of the highest-grossing actors of all time. He has received various awards and nominations, including an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for three British Academy Film Awards and seven Primetime Emmy Awards.
Go to Profile#6102
John Grisham
#6111
Overall Influence
John Ray Grisham Jr. is an American novelist, lawyer, and former member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, known for his best selling legal thrillers. According to the American Academy of Achievement, Grisham has written 37 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers, and his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide. Along with Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling, Grisham is one of only three authors to have sold two million copies on the first printing.
Go to Profile#6103
Viatcheslav Mukhanov
#6112
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Viatcheslav Fyodorovich Mukhanov is a Soviet/Russian born German theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He is best known for the theory of Quantum Origin of the Universe Structure. Working in 1980-1981 with Gennady Chibisov in the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow he predicted the spectrum of inhomogeneities in the Universe, which are originated from the initial quantum fluctuations. The numerous experiments in which there were measured the temperature fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation are in excellent agreement with this theoretical prediction, thus confirming that the galaxies and their clusters originated from the initial quantum fluctuations.
Go to Profile#6104
Donald C. Spencer
#6113
Overall Influence
1912 - 2001 (89 years)
Donald Clayton Spencer was an American mathematician, known for work on deformation theory of structures arising in differential geometry, and on several complex variables from the point of view of partial differential equations. He was born in Boulder, Colorado, and educated at the University of Colorado and MIT.
Go to Profile#6105
Sergey Nikolsky
#6114
Overall Influence
1905 - 2012 (107 years)
Sergey Mikhailovich Nikolsky was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. Biography Nikolsky was born in Talitsa, which was at that time located in Kamyshlovsky Uyezd of the Russian Empire. He had been an Academician since 28 November 1972. He also had won many scientific awards. At the age of 92 he was still actively giving lectures in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 2005, he was only giving talks at scientific conferences, but was still working in MIPT, at the age of 100. He died in Moscow in November 2012 at the age of 107.
Go to Profile#6106
David Chang
#6115
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
David Chang is an American restaurateur, author, podcaster, and television personality. He is the founder of the Momofuku restaurant group. In 2009, Momofuku Ko was awarded two Michelin stars, which the restaurant has retained each year since. In 2011, he co-founded the influential food magazine Lucky Peach, which lasted for 25 quarterly volumes into 2017. In 2018, Chang created, produced, and starred in a Netflix original series called Ugly Delicious, and through his Majordomo Media group, he has produced and/or starred in more television and podcasts. On November 29, 2020, he became the fir...
Go to Profile#6107
Raymond Frey
#6116
Overall Influence
1941 - 2012 (71 years)
Raymond G. Frey was a professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, specializing in moral, political and legal philosophy, and author or editor of a number of books. He was a noted critic of animal rights.
Go to Profile#6108
John Krogstie
#6117
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
John Krogstie is a Norwegian computer scientist, professor in information systems at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, and an expert in the field of enterprise modelling.
Go to Profile#6109
Harry Seidler
#6118
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
Harry Seidler was an Austrian-born Australian architect who is considered to be one of the leading exponents of Modernism's methodology in Australia and the first architect to fully express the principles of the Bauhaus in Australia.
Go to Profile#6110
Srikant Datar
#6119
Overall Influence
Srikant Datar is an Indian-American economist and the Dean of Harvard Business School. At Harvard, he concurrently serves as the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Business Administration. Early life Datar attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. He graduated with distinction in mathematics and economics from St. Xavier's College, University of Mumbai in 1973. At IIM Ahmedabad, he was a gold medalist and the General Secretary of the Student's Council . He is a chartered accountant and holds two master's degrees and a doctorate from Stanford University.
Go to Profile#6111
Wayne Thiebaud
#6120
Overall Influence
1920 - 2021 (101 years)
Morton Wayne Thiebaud was an American painter known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects—pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs—as well as for his landscapes and figure paintings. Thiebaud is associated with the pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his early works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate the works of the classic pop artists. Thiebaud used heavy pigment and exaggerated colors to depict his subjects, and the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements are almost al...
Go to Profile#6112
Samuel Bayer
#6121
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Samuel David Bayer is an American visual artist, cinematographer, and commercial, music video and film director. Bayer was born in Syracuse, New York. He graduated from New York City's School of Visual Arts in 1987 with a degree in Fine Arts. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1991, where he continues to live and work.
Go to Profile#6113
Mark Noll
#6122
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Mark Allan Noll is an American historian specializing in the history of Christianity in the United States. He holds the position of Research Professor of History at Regent College, having previously been Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Noll is a Reformed evangelical Christian and in 2005 was named by Time magazine as one of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals in America.
Go to Profile#6114
Malcolm Fraser
#6123
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
John Malcolm Fraser was an Australian politician who served as the 22nd prime minister of Australia from 1975 to 1983. He held office as the leader of the Liberal Party of Australia. Fraser was raised on his father's sheep stations, and after studying at Magdalen College, Oxford, returned to Australia to take over the family property in the Western District of Victoria. After an initial defeat in 1954, he was elected to the Australian House of Representatives at the 1955 federal election, as a member of parliament for the division of Wannon. He was 25 at the time, making him one of the youngest people ever elected to parliament.
Go to Profile#6115
Peter van Nieuwenhuizen
#6124
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Peter van Nieuwenhuizen is a Dutch theoretical physicist. He is a distinguished Professor at Stony Brook University in the United States. Widely known for his contributions to String theory, Supersymmetry, Supergravity and Field theory.
Go to Profile#6116
Pieter Abbeel
#6125
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Pieter Abbeel is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, and co-director of the Berkeley AI Research Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the co-founder of covariant.ai, a venture-funded start-up that aims to teach robots new, complex skills, and co-founder of Gradescope, an online grading system that has been implemented in over 500 universities nationwide. He is best known for his cutting-edge research in robotics and machine learning, particularly in deep reinforcement learning. In 2021, he joined AIX Ventures as an Investment Partner.
Go to Profile#6117
Ilham Aliyev
#6126
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Ilham Heydar oghlu Aliyev is an Azerbaijani politician who is the fourth president of Azerbaijan since 31 October 2003. He is a former prime minister of Azerbaijan. The son and second child of former Azerbaijani leader Heydar Aliyev, Aliyev became the president of Azerbaijan in 2003 through a presidential election defined by irregularities shortly before his father's death. He was reelected for a second term in 2008 and was allowed to run in elections indefinitely in 2013 and 2018 due to the 2009 constitutional referendum, which removed term limits for presidents. Throughout his electoral cam...
Go to Profile#6118
Harald Helfgott
#6127
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Harald Andrés Helfgott is a Peruvian mathematician working in number theory. Helfgott is a researcher at the CNRS at the Institut Mathématique de Jussieu, Paris. Early life and education Helfgott was born on 25 November 1977 in Lima, Peru. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1998 . He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2003 under the direction of Henryk Iwaniec and Peter Sarnak, with the thesis Root numbers and the parity problem.
Go to Profile#6119
Aloysius Martinich
#6128
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Aloysius Patrick Martinich , usually cited as A. P. Martinich, is an American analytic philosopher. He is the Roy Allison Vaughan Centennial Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at University of Texas at Austin. His area of interest is the nature and practice of interpretation; history of modern philosophy; the philosophy of language ; the history of political thinking and Thomas Hobbes.
Go to Profile#6120
Eduard Shevardnadze
#6129
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Eduard Ambrosis dze Shevardnadze was a Soviet and Georgian politician and diplomat who governed Georgia for several non-consecutive periods from 1972 until his resignation in 2003 and also served as the final Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1985 to 1990.
Go to Profile#6121
Jane Mansbridge
#6130
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Jane Jebb Mansbridge is an American political scientist. She is the Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#6122
Ogden Lindsley
#6131
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Ogden R. Lindsley was an American psychologist. He is best known for developing precision teaching . In 1948, he obtained an A.B. in Psychology from Brown University and two years later in 1950 a Sc.M. in Experimental Psychology. At Harvard University he studied Psychology under B. F. Skinner, earning his Ph.D. in 1957.
Go to Profile#6123
Paul Kirchhof
#6132
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Paul Kirchhof is a German jurist and tax law expert. He is also a professor of law, member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and, a former judge in the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany , the highest court in Germany.
Go to Profile#6124
Alison Richard
#6133
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Dame Alison Fettes Richard, is an English anthropologist, conservationist and university administrator. She was the 344th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the third Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge since the post became full-time, and the second woman. Before arriving at Cambridge, she served as the provost of Yale University from 1994 to 2002.
Go to Profile#6125
Santosh Sivan
#6134
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Santosh Sivan is an Indian cinematographer, film director, producer and actor known for his works in Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi cinema. Santosh graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India and has to date completed 55 feature films and 50 documentaries. He is regarded as one of India's finest and best cinematographers. He Has Won Twelve National Film Awards, Six Filmfare Awards, Four Kerala State Film Awards and Three Tamil Nadu State Film Awards, respectively.
Go to Profile#6126
Les Earnest
#6135
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Lester Donald Earnest is an American computer scientist. Education and career After receiving his B.S. in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1953, he began his career as a computer programmer in 1954 during a stint as a U.S. Navy Aviation Electronics Officer & Digital Computer Project Officer at the Naval Air Development Center in Johnsville, Pennsylvania. In 1956, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 's Lincoln Laboratory to help design the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment air defense system.
Go to Profile#6127
Matt Visser
#6136
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Matt Visser is a mathematics Professor at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand. Career Visser completed a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by Mary K. Gaillard. Visser's research interests include general relativity, quantum field theory and cosmology.
Go to Profile#6128
Earl W. Bascom
#6137
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Earl Wesley Bascom was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, cowboy, rodeo performer, inventor, and Hollywood actor. Raised in Canada, he portrayed in works of fine art his own experiences of cowboying and rodeoing across the American and Canadian West. Bascom was awarded the Pioneer Award by the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in 2016 and inducted into several halls of fame including the Canadian Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1984. Bascom was called the "Cowboy of Cowboy Artists," the "Dean of Rodeo Cowboy Sculpture" and the "Father of Modern Rodeo." He was a participant member of the Church of Jesu...
Go to Profile#6129
Jeffrey A. Hoffman
#6138
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jeffrey Alan Hoffman is an American former NASA astronaut and currently a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Hoffman made five flights as a Space Shuttle astronaut, including the first mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, when the orbiting telescope's flawed optical system was corrected. Trained as an astrophysicist, he also flew on the 1990 Spacelab Shuttle mission that featured the Astro-1 ultraviolet astronomical observatory in the Shuttle's payload bay. Over the course of his five missions he logged more than 1,211 hours and 21.5 million miles in space. He ...
Go to Profile#6130
Robert Cooter
#6139
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Robert D. Cooter is the Herman F. Selvin Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Cooter works in the field of law and economics. He is co-editor of the International Review of Law and Economics, and was among those convened by George Mason University Law School dean, Henry Manne, in January, 1990, to discuss organizing a professional association, prior to formation of the American Law and Economics Association; Cooter was subsequently elected as a founding board member, then served as its president for 1994. In 1999 he was elected to the American Academy of ...
Go to Profile#6131
Vicenç Navarro
#6140
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Vicente Navarro is a Spanish sociologist and political scientist. He has been a Professor of Health and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University, US, for over 30 years. He is also emeritus professor in political and social science at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, and is the director of the JHU-UPF Public Policy Center in Barcelona, which is jointly sponsored by the two institutions. He is also the director of the Observatorio Social de España, where he coordinates a research project on the welfare state.
Go to Profile#6132
Wendy Brown
#6141
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
#6133
Olof Gigon
#6142
Overall Influence
1912 - 1998 (86 years)
Olof Alfred Gigon was a Swiss classical philologist. He is particularly known as a historian of philosophy and translator of ancient philosophical texts. Biography Olof Gigon, son of the physician Alfred Gigon , was born and grew up in Basel, where he studied classical and oriental philology. He spent one semester in Munich in years 1932/33. During his studies, he learned Arabic, Persian and Turkish. Gigon received his doctorate in 1934 with the dissertation research on Heraclitus. He spent the next two years studying in Paris. In 1937, he qualified as an assistant professor with an investiga...
Go to Profile#6134
Fausto Cercignani
#6143
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Fausto Cercignani is an Italian scholar, essayist and poet. Biography Born to Tuscan parents, Fausto Cercignani studied in Milan, where he graduated in foreign languages and literatures with a dissertation dealing with English at Shakespeare’s time. His career as a university professor was at first characterized by philological investigations in the fields of English studies and Germanic studies. In 1983, after teaching at the Universities of Bergamo , Parma , and Pisa , he returned to Milan and carried on his activity at the University of Milan, where he intensified his researches on German ...
Go to Profile#6135
David Singmaster
#6144
Overall Influence
1938 - 2023 (85 years)
David Breyer Singmaster was an American-British mathematician who was emeritus professor of mathematics at London South Bank University, England. He had a huge personal collection of mechanical puzzles and books of brain teasers. He was most famous for being an early adopter and enthusiastic promoter of the Rubik's Cube. His Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube" which he began compiling in 1979 provided the first mathematical analysis of the Cube as well as providing one of the first published solutions. The book contained his cube notation which allowed the recording of Rubik's Cube moves, and which...
Go to Profile#6136
Victor Kolyvagin
#6145
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Victor Alexandrovich Kolyvagin is a Russian mathematician who wrote a series of papers on Euler systems, leading to breakthroughs on the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, and Iwasawa's conjecture for cyclotomic fields. His work also influenced Andrew Wiles's work on Fermat's Last Theorem.
Go to Profile#6137
Yusef Komunyakaa
#6146
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his contribution to poetry.
Go to Profile#6138
Jeffrey S. Lehman
#6147
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jeffrey Sean Lehman is an American scholar, lawyer and academic administrator who is the vice chancellor of New York University Shanghai. Known as an advocate for the role of universities in globalization, he previously served as chancellor and founding dean of the Peking University School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen, China, president of Cornell University, dean of the University of Michigan Law School, and chairman of Internet2.
Go to Profile#6139
Scott F. Gilbert
#6148
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Scott Frederick Gilbert is an American evolutionary developmental biologist and historian of biology. Scott Gilbert is the Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology at Swarthmore College and a Finland Distinguished Professor at the University of Helsinki.
Go to Profile#6140
Moti Yung
#6149
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mordechai M. "Moti" Yung is a cryptographer and computer scientist known for his work on cryptovirology and kleptography. Career Yung earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1988 under the supervision of Zvi Galil. In the past, he worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, CertCo, RSA Laboratories, and Google. In 2016, Yung moved from Google to Snap Inc. Yung is currently a research scientist at Google.
Go to Profile#6141
Yasutomi Nishizuka
#6150
Overall Influence
1932 - 2004 (72 years)
Yasutomi Nishizuka, MJA, ForMemRS was a prominent Japanese biochemist and made important contributions to the understanding of molecular mechanism of signal transduction across the cell membrane. In 1977, he discovered protein kinase C, which plays significant roles in a variety of intracellular signal transduction processes.
Go to Profile#6142
Denis Dutton
#6151
Overall Influence
1944 - 2010 (66 years)
Denis Laurence Dutton was an American philosopher of art, web entrepreneur, and media activist. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was also a co-founder and co-editor of the websites Arts & Letters Daily, ClimateDebateDaily.com, and cybereditions.com.
Go to Profile#6143
Gary Schwartz
#6152
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Gary E. Schwartz is an American psychologist, author, parapsychologist and professor at the University of Arizona and the director of its Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health. Schwartz researches the veracity of mediums and energy healing.
Go to Profile#6144
Glenn Murcutt
#6153
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Glenn Marcus Murcutt AO is an Australian architect and winner of the 1992 Alvar Aalto Medal, the 2002 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the 2009 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the 2021 Praemium Imperiale. Glenn Murcutt works as a sole practitioner without staff, builds only within Australia and is known to be very selective with his projects. Being the only Australian winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize, he is often referred to as Australia's most famous architect.
Go to Profile#6145
Paule Marshall
#6154
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Paule Marshall was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant. Life and career Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, New York, to Adriana Viola Clement Burke and Sam Burke on April 9, 1929. Marshall's father had migrated from the Caribbean island of Barbados to New York in 1919 and, during her childhood, deserted the family to join a quasi-religious cult, leaving his wife to raise their children by herself. Marshall wrote about how her career was inspired by observ...
Go to Profile#6146
Forrest J Ackerman
#6155
Overall Influence
1916 - 2008 (92 years)
Forrest James Ackerman was an American magazine editor; science fiction writer and literary agent; a founder of science fiction fandom; a leading expert on science fiction, horror, and fantasy films; a prominent advocate of the Esperanto language; and one of the world's most avid collectors of genre books and film memorabilia. He was based in Los Angeles, California.
Go to Profile#6147
Gualtiero Piccinini
#6156
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Gualtiero Piccinini is an Italian–American philosopher known for his work on the nature of mind and computation as well as on how to integrate psychology and neuroscience. He is Curators' Distinguished Professor in the Philosophy Department and Associate Director of the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
Go to Profile#6148
Maurice Meisner
#6157
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Maurice Jerome Meisner was an American sinologist. He was a historian of 20th century China and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His study of the Chinese Revolution and the People's Republic was in conjunction with his strong interest in socialist ideology, Marxism, and Maoism in particular. He authored a number of books including Mao's China: A History of the People's Republic which became a standard academic text in that area.
Go to Profile#6149
Doyle Brunson
#6158
Overall Influence
1933 - 2023 (90 years)
Doyle Frank Brunson was an American poker player who played professionally for over 50 years. He was a two-time World Series of Poker Main Event champion, a Poker Hall of Fame inductee, and the author of several books on poker.
Go to Profile#6150
William H. Frey
#6159
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
William Henry Frey is a noted American demographer and author. He is currently a Senior Fellow with Brookings Metro at the Brookings Institution and a Research Professor at the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center. According to Michael Barone, "Frey is widely acknowledged as America’s leading demographer."
Go to Profile