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
#6201
Patrick Vieira
#6210
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Patrick Paul Vieira is a French professional football manager and former player who is the head coach of club Strasbourg. He is widely considered as one of the greatest midfielders of his generation, one of the greatest midfielders in Premier League history, one of the best captains in league history, and amongst Arsenal's greatest-ever players.
Go to Profile#6202
Ryan Crocker
#6211
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ryan Clark Crocker is a retired American diplomat who served as a career ambassador within the United States Foreign Service. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he served as United States ambassador to Afghanistan , Iraq , Pakistan , Syria , Kuwait , and Lebanon . In January 2010, he became dean of Texas A&M University's George Bush School of Government and Public Service.
Go to Profile#6203
Ernst Stuhlinger
#6212
Overall Influence
1913 - 2008 (95 years)
Ernst Stuhlinger was a German-American atomic, electrical, and rocket scientist. After being brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip, he developed guidance systems with Wernher von Braun's team for the US Army, and later was a scientist with NASA. He was also instrumental in the development of the ion engine for long-endurance space flight, and a wide variety of scientific experiments.
Go to Profile#6204
Byron Allen
#6213
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Byron Allen Folks is an American businessman, television producer, and comedian. He is the founder of the U.S. media company Entertainment Studios, which has interests in television production, broadcasting, film production, and digital media.
Go to Profile#6205
Max Martin
#6214
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Karl Martin Sandberg , known professionally as Max Martin, is a Swedish singer, songwriter and record producer. He rose to prominence in the late 1990s making a string of hit singles such as Britney Spears's "...Baby One More Time" , the Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way" , Céline Dion's "That's the Way It Is" and NSYNC's "It's Gonna Be Me" .
Go to Profile#6206
Simin Daneshvar
#6215
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Simin Dāneshvar was an Iranian academic, novelist, fiction writer, and translator. She was largely regarded as the first major Iranian woman novelist. Her books dealt with the lives of ordinary Iranians, especially those of women, and through the lens of recent political and social events in Iran at the time. Daneshvar had a number of firsts to her credit; in 1948, her collection of Persian short stories was the first by an Iranian woman to be published. The first novel by an Iranian woman was her Savushun , which went on to become a bestseller. Daneshvar's Playhouse, a collection of five sto...
Go to Profile#6207
Marcia Baron
#6216
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Marcia Baron is an American philosopher and the Rudy Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. Her main research interests include moral philosophy, moral psychology, and philosophical issues in criminal law. Baron is an associate editor of Inquiry, a member of the editorial board of The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, a series editor for New Directions in Ethics, and a member of the editorial board of the North American Kant Studies in Philosophy.
Go to Profile#6208
Ibrahim Babangida
#6217
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida is a Nigerian retired general and statesman who served as military president of Nigeria from 1985 until his resignation in 1993. He rose through the ranks to serve from 1984 to 1985 as Chief of Army Staff; going on to orchestrate his seizure of power in a coup d'état against Muhammadu Buhari.
Go to Profile#6209
David Kaplan
#6218
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
David Benjamin Kaplan is an American philosopher. He is the Hans Reichenbach Professor of Scientific Philosophy at the UCLA Department of Philosophy. His philosophical work focuses on the philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of Frege and Russell. He is best known for his work on demonstratives, propositions, and reference in intensional contexts. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1983 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2007.
Go to Profile#6210
Wolfgang Streeck
#6219
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Wolfgang Streeck is a German economic sociologist and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Early life Streeck was born "just outside Münster", the son of refugees – ethnic Germans from eastern Europe displaced at the end of the Second World War. His mother was a Sudeten German from Czechoslovakia.
Go to Profile#6211
David K. Levine
#6220
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
David Knudsen Levine is department of Economics and Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Study Joint Chair at the European University Institute; he is John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. His research includes the study of intellectual property and endogenous growth in dynamic general equilibrium models, the endogenous formation of preferences, social norms and institutions, learning in games, and game theory applications to experimental economics.
Go to Profile#6212
Julian Nida-Rümelin
#6221
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Julian Nida-Rümelin is a German philosopher and public intellectual. He served as State Minister for Culture of the Federal Republic of Germany under Chancellor Schröder. He was professor of philosophy and political theory at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich until 2020. Nida-Rümelin is vice chairman of the German Ethics Council.
Go to Profile#6213
Simon Marlow
#6222
Overall Influence
Simon Marlow is a British computer scientist, programmer, author, and co-developer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler for the programming language Haskell. He and Simon Peyton Jones won the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award in 2011 for their work on GHC. Marlow's book Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell was published in July 2013.
Go to Profile#6214
Samer Hattar
#6223
Overall Influence
Samer Hattar is a chronobiologist and a leader in the field of non-image forming photoreception. He is the Chief of the Section on Light and Circadian Rhythms at the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the National Institutes of Health. He was previously an associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. He is best known for his investigation into the role of melanopsin and intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells in the entrainment of circadian rhythms.
Go to Profile#6215
Sergio Aragonés
#6224
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Sergio Aragonés Domenech is a Spanish/Mexican cartoonist and writer best known for his contributions to Mad magazine and creating the comic book Groo the Wanderer. Among his peers and fans, Aragonés is widely regarded as "the world's fastest cartoonist". The Comics Journal has described Aragonés as "one of the most prolific and brilliant cartoonists of his generation". Mad editor Al Feldstein said, "He could have drawn the whole magazine if we'd let him."
Go to Profile#6216
Robert Stoller
#6225
Overall Influence
1924 - 1991 (67 years)
Robert Jesse Stoller , was an American professor of psychiatry at UCLA Medical School and a researcher at the UCLA Gender Identity Clinic. He was born in Crestwood, New York, and died in Los Angeles, California. He had psychoanalytic training at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute from 1953 to 1961 with analysis by Hanna Fenichel. He has been criticized for research into finding the cause of transgender identities with intent to prevent them, and later similar research he inspired.
Go to Profile#6217
M. John Harrison
#6226
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Michael John Harrison , known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories , Climbers , and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light , Nova Swing and Empty Space .
Go to Profile#6218
Diana Baumrind
#6227
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Diana Blumberg Baumrind was a clinical and developmental psychologist known for her research on parenting styles and for her critique of the use of deception in psychological research. Early life and education Baumrind was born into a Jewish community in New York City, the first of two daughters of Hyman and Mollie Blumberg. She completed her B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy at Hunter College in 1948, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled "Some personality and situational determinants of behavior in a discussio...
Go to Profile#6219
Michael R. Douglas
#6228
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Michael R. Douglas is an American theoretical physicist, best known for his work in string theory and mathematical physics. Biography Douglas was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the son of Nancy and Ronald G. Douglas, a mathematician specializing in operator algebras. He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University. He then went to Caltech and received a PhD in physics in 1988 under John Schwarz, one of the developers and leading researchers in superstring theory.
Go to Profile#6220
Feza Gürsey
#6229
Overall Influence
1921 - 1992 (71 years)
Feza Gürsey was a Turkish mathematician and physicist. Among his contributions to theoretical physics, his work on the chiral model and on SU symmetry of the quark model are the most well-known. Early life Feza Gürsey was born on April 7, 1921, in Istanbul, to Reşit Süreyya Gürsey, a military physician, and Remziye Hisar, a chemist and a pioneering Turkish scientist. He graduated from Galatasaray High School in 1940, and received his degree in Mathematics – Physics from Istanbul University in 1944.
Go to Profile#6221
Eddy Merckx
#6230
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Édouard Louis Joseph, Baron Merckx , is a Belgian former professional road and track cyclist racer who is the most successful rider in the history of competitive cycling. His victories include an unequalled eleven Grand Tours , all five Monuments, setting the hour record, three World Championships, every major one-day race other than Paris–Tours, and extensive victories on the track.
Go to Profile#6222
William H. Press
#6231
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
William Henry Press is an astrophysicist, theoretical physicist, computer scientist, and computational biologist. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1989 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "in recognition of important theoretical contributions to relativistic astrophysics and to cosmology" Other honors include the 1981 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy. Press has been a member of the JASON defense advisory group since 1977 and is a past chair.
Go to Profile#6223
David L. Mills
#6232
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
David L. Mills is an American computer engineer and Internet pioneer. Education Mills earned his PhD in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1971. While at Michigan he worked on the ARPA sponsored Conversational Use of Computers project and developed DEC PDP-8 based hardware and software to allow terminals to be connected over phone lines to an IBM 360 mainframe.
Go to Profile#6224
Samy Bengio
#6233
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Samy Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, Senior Director of AI and Machine Learning Research at Apple, and a former long-time scientist at Google known for leading a large group of researchers working in machine learning including adversarial settings. Bengio left Google shortly after the company fired his report, Timnit Gebru, without first notifying him. At the time, Bengio said that he had been "stunned" by what happened to Gebru. He is also among the three authors who developed Torch in 2002, the ancestor of PyTorch, one of today's two largest machine learning frameworks.
Go to Profile#6225
Ahmed Ali
#6234
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Ahmed Ali was a Pakistani novelist, poet, critic, translator, diplomat and scholar. A pioneer of the modern Urdu short story, his works include the short story collections: , 1932; Hamari Gali , 1940; Qaid Khana , 1942; and Maut Se Pehle , 1945. His other writings include Twilight in Delhi , his first novel in the English language.
Go to Profile#6226
U Nu
#6235
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Nu , commonly known as U Nu and also by the honorific name Thakin Nu, was a leading Burmese statesman and nationalist politician. He was the first Prime Minister of Burma under the provisions of the 1947 Constitution of the Union of Burma, from 4 January 1948 to 12 June 1956, again from 28 February 1957 to 28 October 1958, and finally from 4 April 1960 to 2 March 1962.
Go to Profile#6227
François Regnault
#6236
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
François Regnault is a French philosopher, playwright and dramaturg. Also a university instructor and teacher, Regnault was maître de conférences at Paris VIII before his retirement. Among his various writings he is the author, with Jean-Claude Milner, of the seminal Dire le vers and of Conférences d'esthétique lacanienne.
Go to Profile#6228
Yves Coppens
#6237
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Yves Coppens was a French anthropologist and co-discoverer of "Lucy"[1]. A graduate from the University of Rennes and the Sorbonne, he studied ancient hominidss and had multiple published works on this topic, and also produced a film. In October 2014, Coppens was named an Ordinary Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Francis.
Go to Profile#6229
Pattie Maes
#6238
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Pattie Maes is an American scientist. She is a professor in MIT's program in Media Arts and Sciences. She founded and directed the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group. Previously, she founded and ran the Software Agents group. She served for several years as both the head and associate head of the Media Lab's academic program. Prior to joining the Media Lab, Maes was a visiting professor and a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. She holds bachelor's and PhD degrees in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.
Go to Profile#6230
McKenzie Wark
#6239
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. She is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.
Go to Profile#6231
Jim A. Kuypers
#6240
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jim A. Kuypers is an American scholar and consultant specializing in communication studies. A professor at Virginia Tech, he has written on the news media, rhetorical criticism and presidential rhetoric, and is particularly known for his work in political communication which explores the qualitative aspects of framing analysis and its relationship to presidential communication and news media bias.
Go to Profile#6232
Kate Manne
#6241
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Kate Alice Manne is an Australian philosopher, associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, and author. Her work is primarily in feminist philosophy, moral philosophy, and social philosophy.
Go to Profile#6233
Marianne Williamson
#6242
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Marianne Deborah Williamson is an American author, speaker, and presidential candidate. She began her professional career as spiritual leader of the Church of Today, a Unity Church in Warren, Michigan. Williamson has written several self-help books, including A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles in 1992, which became a New York Times Best Seller. She was launched into prominence by Oprah Winfrey, being a frequent guest on her daytime talk show and becoming known as her "spiritual advisor".
Go to Profile#6234
Sara Danius
#6243
Overall Influence
1962 - 2019 (57 years)
Sara Maria Danius was a Swedish literary critic and philosopher, and a scholar of literature and aesthetics. Danius was professor of aesthetics at Södertörn University, docent of literature at Uppsala University and professor in literary science at Stockholm University.
Go to Profile#6235
Mitch Albom
#6244
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mitchell David Albom is an American author, journalist, and musician. As of 2021, books he'd authored had sold over 40 million copies worldwide. Having achieved national recognition for sports writing in his early career, he turned to writing inspirational stories and themes—a preeminent early one being Tuesdays with Morrie—themes that now weave their way through his books, plays, and films and stageplays.
Go to Profile#6236
Lee Teng-hui
#6245
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Lee Teng-hui was a Taiwanese statesman and agriculturist who served as President of the Republic of China under the 1947 Constitution and chairman of the Kuomintang from 1988 to 2000. He was the first president to be born in Taiwan, the last to be indirectly elected and the first to be directly elected. During his presidency, Lee oversaw the end of martial law and the full democratization of the ROC, advocated the Taiwanese localization movement, and led an ambitious foreign policy agenda to gain allies around the world. Nicknamed "Mr. Democracy", Lee was credited as the president who compl...
Go to Profile#6237
Lev Gudkov
#6246
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Lev Dmitrievich Gudkov is a Russian sociologist, director of the analytical Levada Center and editor-in-chief of the journal The Russian Public Opinion Herald. Scientific activity Gudkov studied journalism, sociology and philology at the Lomonosov Moscow State University and graduated in 1971. He continued his post-graduate studies at the Institute for philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences until 1977. His dissertation concerned the Max Weber's concept of the methodology of social sciences and the German tradition of the understanding sociology. In 1995 Gudkov did his doctor in philoso...
Go to Profile#6238
Russell Alan Hulse
#6247
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Russell Alan Hulse is an American physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with his thesis advisor Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr., "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation".
Go to Profile#6239
Jürgen Klopp
#6248
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Jürgen Norbert Klopp is a German professional football manager and former player who is the manager of club Liverpool. He is widely regarded as one of the best football managers in the world. Klopp spent most of his playing career at Mainz 05. He was initially deployed as a striker, but was later moved to defence. Upon retiring in 2001, Klopp became the club's manager, and secured Bundesliga promotion in 2004. After suffering relegation in the 2006–07 season and unable to achieve promotion, Klopp resigned in 2008 as the club's longest-serving manager. He then became manager of Borussia Dortm...
Go to Profile#6240
Claudio Ranieri
#6249
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Claudio Ranieri Grande Ufficiale OMRI is an Italian football manager and former player, serving as the current manager of club Cagliari. Ranieri began his managerial career in the lower leagues in Italy during the late 1980s, and made his name at Cagliari, whom he took from Serie C1 up to Serie A in successive seasons. He later went on to manage Napoli, where he led the team to qualify for the UEFA Cup, only to be dismissed the following season. In 1993, he joined Fiorentina, and immediately led them to Serie A promotion, also winning the Coppa Italia and the Supercoppa Italiana in 1996, before moving to Spain in 1997, to manage Valencia and then Atlético Madrid.
Go to Profile#6241
Martin van Creveld
#6250
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Martin Levi van Creveld is an Israeli military historian and theorist. Life and career Van Creveld was born in the Netherlands in the city of Rotterdam to a Jewish family. His parents, Leon and Margaret, were staunch Zionists who had managed to evade the gestapo during World War II.
Go to Profile#6242
Jack Lew
#6251
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jacob Joseph Lew is an American attorney and diplomat serving as the United States ambassador to Israel. He was the seventy-sixth United States secretary of the treasury from 2013 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he also served as the twenty-fifth White House chief of staff from 2012 to 2013 and as director of the Office of Management and Budget in both the Clinton administration and Obama administration.
Go to Profile#6243
Trygve Reenskaug
#6252
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Trygve Mikkjel Heyerdahl Reenskaug is a Norwegian computer scientist and professor emeritus of the University of Oslo. He formulated the model–view–controller pattern for graphical user interface software design in 1979 while visiting the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center . His first major software project, "Autokon," produced a successful computer-aided design – computer-aided manufacturing program which was first used in 1963, and continued in use by shipyards worldwide for more than 30 years.
Go to Profile#6244
Steven Levitsky
#6253
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Steven Levitsky is an American political scientist and Professor of Government at Harvard University. A comparative political scientist, his research interests focus on Latin America and include political parties and party systems, authoritarianism and democratization, and weak and informal institutions. He is notable for his work on competitive authoritarian regimes and informal political institutions.
Go to Profile#6245
Gustav Nossal
#6254
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Sir Gustav Victor Joseph Nossal is an Austrian-born Australian research biologist. He is famous for his contributions to the fields of antibody formation and immunological tolerance. Early life and education Nossal's family was from Vienna, Austria. He was born four weeks prematurely in Bad Ischl while his mother was on holiday. His family left their home town of Vienna for Australia in 1939 following Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria. As his father's grandparents were Jewish, he was also considered Jewish and at risk of being sent to concentration camps. In an interview with Adam Spencer...
Go to Profile#6246
Matthew D. Green
#6255
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Matthew Daniel Green is an American cryptographer and security technologist. Green is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. He specializes in applied cryptography, privacy-enhanced information storage systems, anonymous cryptocurrencies, elliptic curve crypto-systems, and satellite television piracy. He is a member of the teams that developed the Zerocoin anonymous cryptocurrency and Zerocash. He has also been influential in the development of the Zcash system. He has been involved in the groups that exposed vulnerabilities in RSA BSAFE, Speedpass and E-ZPass.
Go to Profile#6247
Lee Mack
#6256
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Lee Gordon McKillop , known by his stage name Lee Mack, is an English comedian, actor, podcaster and presenter. He is known for his quick wit, writing and starring in the sitcom Not Going Out, being a team captain on the BBC One comedy panel show Would I Lie to You?, hosting the Sky One panel show Duck Quacks Don't Echo, presenting the panel show They Think It's All Over, and hosting Freeze the Fear with Wim Hof alongside Holly Willoughby. He has also been a guest host on Have I Got News for You and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, a guest captain on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, and a guest panellist on QI.
Go to Profile#6248
William I. Robinson
#6257
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
William I. Robinson is an American professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work focuses on political economy, globalization, Latin America and historical materialism. He is a member of the International Parliamentary and Civil Society Mission to Investigate the Political Transition in Iraq.
Go to Profile#6249
N. K. Singh
#6258
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Nand Kishore Singh is an Indian politician, economist and former Indian Administrative Service officer. He is a senior member of the Bharatiya Janata Party since March 2014 after having served as a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha from Bihar for the Janata Dal . He has been a senior bureaucrat, Member of the Planning Commission and handled assignments of Union Expenditure and Revenue Secretary. He was also Officer on Special Duty to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Go to Profile#6250
Alan Emtage
#6259
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Alan Emtage is a Bajan-Canadian computer scientist who conceived and implemented the first version of Archie, a pre-Web Internet search engine for locating material in public FTP archives. It is widely considered the world's first Internet search engine.
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