Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#6251

Avrim Blum

#6260

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Avrim Blum is a computer scientist. In 2007, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to learning theory and algorithms." Blum attended MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in 1991 under professor Ron Rivest. He was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University from 1991 to 2017.

#6252

Hans Robert Jauss

#6261

Overall Influence

1921 - 1997 (76 years)

Hans Robert Jauss was a German academic, notable for his work in reception theory and medieval and modern French literature. His approach was derived from the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Early years and education Jauss was born in Göppingen, Württemberg, Germany, and died on 1 March 1997 in Constance, Germany. His family came from a long line of teachers. His religious background was pietism. Jauss’s Gymnasium studies took place in Esslingen and Geislingen between 1932 and 1939. As a young soldier in the Second World War, Jauss spent two winters on the Russian Front in the SS and the Waffen-SS.

#6253

Li-Meng Yan

#6262

Overall Influence

Li-Meng Yan or Yan Limeng is a Chinese virologist, known for her publications and interviews alleging that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese government laboratory. Her publications have been widely dismissed as flawed by the scientific community.

#6254

Angela McRobbie

Angela McRobbie

#6263

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Angela McRobbie is a British cultural theorist, feminist, and commentator whose work combines the study of popular culture, contemporary media practices and feminism through conceptions of a third-person reflexive gaze. She is a professor of communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

#6255

James Clavell

#6264

Overall Influence

1921 - 1994 (73 years)

James Clavell was an Australian-born British writer, screenwriter, director, and World War II veteran and prisoner of war. Clavell is best known as the author of his Asian Saga novels, a number of which have had television adaptations. Clavell also wrote such screenplays as those for The Fly and The Great Escape . He directed the popular 1967 film To Sir, with Love for which he also wrote the script.

#6256

George E. Marcus

George E. Marcus

#6265

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

George Emanuel Marcus is an American professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine who focuses on the anthropology of elites. Education and life Marcus received a B.A. from Yale University in 1968 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1976. He spent the 1982–83 academic year at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where he came up with the idea for Anthropology as Cultural Critique, which he co-wrote with Michael M. J. Fischer and published in 1986 .

#6257

Tristan Needham

#6266

Overall Influence

Tristan Needham is a British mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of San Francisco. Education, career and publications Tristan is the son of social anthropologist Rodney Needham of Oxford, England. He attended the Dragon School. Later Needham attended the University of Oxford and studied physics at Merton College, and then transferred to the Mathematical Institute where he studied under Roger Penrose. He obtained his D.Phil. in 1987 and in 1989 took up his post at University of San Francisco.

#6258

Peter Hallward

#6267

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Peter Hallward is a political philosopher, best known for his work on Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. He has also published works on post-colonialism and contemporary Haiti. Hallward is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy and a contributing editor to Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

#6259

Vittorio Grilli

#6268

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Vittorio Grilli is an Italian economist and academic. He was Italy's minister of economy and finance from 2012 to 2013 as part of the Monti cabinet. Education Grilli was born in Milan on 19 May 1957. He graduated from Bocconi University in Milan in 1981 with a master of arts degree in economics. He received a PhD in economics from the University of Rochester in 1986.

#6260

Melvin Konner

#6269

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Melvin Joel Konner is an American anthropologist who is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University. He studied at Brooklyn College, CUNY , where he met Marjorie Shostak, whom he later married and with whom he had three children. He also has a PhD from Harvard University and a MD from Harvard Medical School .

#6261

Eamonn Butler

#6270

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Eamonn Butler is a British economist. He is the co-founder and director of the Adam Smith Institute. Early life Eamonn Butler was born in 1953. His brother is Stuart Butler. He graduated from the University of St Andrews. and also studied at the University of Aberdeen.

#6262

Ronald A. Howard

#6271

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Ronald Arthur Howard is an emeritus professor in the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. Howard directs teaching and research in decision analysis at Stanford and is the Director of the Decisions and Ethics Center, which examines the efficacy and ethics of decision-making under uncertainties. He coined the term "Decision Analysis" in a paper in 1966, kickstarting the field. He was a founding Director and Chairman of Strategic Decisions Group. Current research interests are improving the quality of decisions, life-and-death decision-making, and the creation of a coercion-free society.

#6263

José Andrés

#6272

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

José Ramón Andrés Puerta is a Washington, D.C.-based, Spanish-American chef and restaurateur. He owns restaurants in several cities around the United States, and has won a number of awards, both for his cooking , and for his humanitarian work. He is a professor and the founder of the Global Food Institute at George Washington University.

#6264

Andrés Manuel López Obrador

#6273

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Andrés Manuel López Obrador , also known by his initials AMLO, is a Mexican politician who has been serving as the 65th president of Mexico since 1 December 2018. He previously served as Head of Government of Mexico City from 2000 to 2005.

#6265

Alison Jaggar

#6274

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Alison Mary Jaggar is an American feminist philosopher born in England. She is College Professor of Distinction in the Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies departments at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. She was one of the first people to introduce feminist concerns in to philosophy.

#6266

Stephen Grossberg

Stephen Grossberg

#6275

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Stephen Grossberg is a cognitive scientist, theoretical and computational psychologist, neuroscientist, mathematician, biomedical engineer, and neuromorphic technologist. He is the Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics & Statistics, Psychological & Brain Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.

#6267

Lewis Binford

#6276

Overall Influence

1931 - 2011 (80 years)

Lewis Roberts Binford was an American archaeologist known for his influential work in archaeological theory, ethnoarchaeology and the Paleolithic period. He is widely considered among the most influential archaeologists of the later 20th century, and is credited with fundamentally changing the field with the introduction of processual archaeology in the 1960s. Binford's influence was controversial, however, and most theoretical work in archaeology in the late 1980s and 1990s was explicitly construed as either a reaction to or in support of the processual paradigm. Recent appraisals have judg...

#6268

Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer

#6277

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist. He is known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated , Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close , Here I Am , and for his non-fiction works Eating Animals and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast . He teaches creative writing at New York University.

#6269

Julius Nyerere

#6278

Overall Influence

1922 - 1999 (77 years)

Julius Kambarage Nyerere was a Tanzanian anti-colonial activist, politician and political theorist. He governed Tanganyika as prime minister from 1961 to 1962 and then as president from 1962 to 1964, after which he led its successor state, Tanzania, as president from 1964 to 1985. He was a founding member and chair of the Tanganyika African National Union party, and of its successor Chama Cha Mapinduzi, from 1954 to 1990. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he promoted a political philosophy known as Ujamaa.

#6270

Eric Alterman

#6279

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Eric Alterman is an American historian, journalist, author, media critic, blogger, and educator. He is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and the author of eleven books. From 1995 to 2020, Alterman was "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation. He is a contributing writer there, and at The American Prospect, where under a two-year grant he wrote the newsletter, Altercation, until January 27, 2023. In his farewell newsletter column Alterman stated that he opened a Substack page also entitled, Altercation, on January 21. 2023, and that although publi...

#6271

Jean Watson

#6280

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Jean Watson, PhD, RN, AHN-BC, FAAN, LL is an American nurse theorist and nursing professor who is best known for her theory of human caring. She is the author of numerous texts, including Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring. Watson's research on caring has been incorporated into education and patient care at hundreds of nursing schools and healthcare facilities across the world.

#6272

Walter Jens

#6281

Overall Influence

1923 - 2013 (90 years)

Walter Jens was a German philologist, literature historian, critic, university professor and writer. He was born in Hamburg, and attended the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums from 1933 to 1941, when he gained his Abitur, before studying at the University of Hamburg.

#6273

Wolfgang Ischinger

Wolfgang Ischinger

#6282

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Wolfgang Friedrich Ischinger is a German diplomat who served as chairman of the Munich Security Conference from 2008 to 2022. From 2001 to 2006, Ischinger was the German ambassador to the United States, and from 1998 to 2001, he was Staatssekretär in Berlin. He was Germany's ambassador to the Court of St. James's from 2006 to May, 2008. He was also Global Head of Government Relations of Allianz SE from March 2008 until December 2014. He serves on the supervisory board of Allianz Deutschland AG, on the European Advisory Board of Investcorp and on the governing board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

#6274

Pat Cadigan

#6283

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Patricia Oren Kearney Cadigan is a British-American science fiction author, whose work is most often identified with the cyberpunk movement. Her novels and short stories often explore the relationship between the human mind and technology. Her debut novel, Mindplayers, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988.

#6275

Salman Akhtar

#6284

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Salman Akhtar is an Indian-American psychoanalyst practicing in the United States. He is an author and Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Biography Salman Akhtar was born in Khairabad, Uttar Pradesh to Jan Nisar Akhtar, a Bollywood film songwriter and Urdu poet, and Safia Akhtar, a teacher and writer. His grandfather, Muztar Khairabadi, was a poet while his great great grandfather, Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, was a scholar of Islamic studies and theology and played an important role in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. He is the brother of veteran poet and film lyricist Javed Akhtar and brother-in-law of actress and social activist Shabana Azmi.

#6276

Sonia Syngal

#6285

Overall Influence

Sonia Syngal is an American businesswoman who formerly served as the chief executive officer of Gap, Inc., the largest specialty apparel company in the U.S. Early life and education Syngal was born to Sushma and Satya Syngal in India, before her family moved to Canada at a young age. She later moved to the United States where she got her bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kettering University in 1993. and her Master's in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Stanford University in 1995.

#6277

Richard Clarida

Richard Clarida

#6286

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Richard Harris Clarida is an American economist who served as the 21st Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve from 2018 to 2022. Clarida resigned his post on January 14, 2022, to return from public service leave to teach at Columbia University for the spring term of 2022. He is the C. Lowell Harriss Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Columbia University and, from 2006 until September 2018, Global Strategic Advisor for PIMCO. He is notable for his contributions to dynamic stochastic general equilibrium theory and international monetary economics. He is a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and is a recipient of the Treasury Medal.

#6278

Salvador Moncada

Salvador Moncada

#6287

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Sir Salvador Enrique Moncada Seidner, FRS, FRCP, FMedSci is a Honduran pharmacologist and professor. He is currently Research Domain Director for Cancer at the University of Manchester. In the past, he was the Research Director of the Wellcome Research Laboratories from 1986 to 1995 and, until recently, the Director of the UCL Wolfson Institute, which he established at University College London in 1996. His research interests include inflammation and vascular biology and he is currently working on the regulation of cell proliferation. He gained fame for his discoveries related to nitric oxide...

#6279

Carl Kesselman

#6288

Overall Influence

Carl Kesselman is an American computer scientist specializing in grid computing technologies. This term was developed by him and professor Ian Foster in the book The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure. He and Foster are winners of the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal for their grid work. He is institute fellow at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute and a professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, at the University of Southern California.

#6280

Pete Brown

#6289

Overall Influence

1940 - 2023 (83 years)

Peter Ronald Brown was an English performance poet, lyricist, and singer best known for his collaborations with Cream and Jack Bruce. Brown formed the bands Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments and Pete Brown & Piblokto! and worked with Graham Bond and Phil Ryan. Brown also wrote film scripts and formed a film production company.

#6281

John Perry

#6290

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

John Richard Perry is a professor at Stanford University and the University of California, Riverside. He has made significant contributions to philosophy in the fields of philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is known primarily for his work on situation semantics , reflexivity, indexicality, personal identity, and self-knowledge.

#6282

Clayborne Carson

Clayborne Carson

#6291

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Clayborne Carson is an American academic who is a professor of history at Stanford University and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Since 1985, he has directed the Martin Luther King Papers Project, a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of Martin Luther King Jr.

#6283

Koichi Hamada

#6292

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

is the Tuntex Professor Emeritus of Economics at Yale University, where he specializes in the Japanese economy and international economics. Hamada also serves as economic adviser to Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and is credited as one of the key architects of Abenomics, economic policies based upon "three arrows" of monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reform. From January 2001 to July 2002, Hamada served as the first president of the Economic and Social Research Institute of the Cabinet Office of the Japanese Government. At one time Hamada was also a contender to head the WTO.

#6284

Charles Perrow

#6293

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Charles B. Perrow was an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and visiting professor at Stanford University. He authored several books and many articles on organizations, and was primarily concerned with the impact of large organizations on society.

#6285

Craig Larman

#6294

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Craig Larman is a Canadian computer scientist, author, and organizational development consultant. With Bas Vodde, he is best known for formulating LeSS , and for several books on product and software development.

#6286

Vikram Adve

#6295

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Vikram Adve is the Donald B. Gillies professor in the Department of Computer Science and a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Academia In 2020, Vikram Adve became a co-founder and co-director of the Center for Digital Agriculture and leads AIFARMS, a $20M National Artificial Intelligence Research Institute funded by NIFA and NSF at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

#6287

David Adjaye

#6296

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Sir David Frank Adjaye is a Ghanaian-British architect. He is known for having designed many notable buildings around the world, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Adjaye was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to architecture. He is the recipient of the 2021 Royal Gold Medal, making him the first African recipient and one of the youngest recipients. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2022.

#6288

Kelly Slater

#6297

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Robert Kelly Slater is an American professional surfer, best known for being crowned World Surf League champion a record 11 times. Slater is widely regarded as the greatest professional surfer of all time, and holds 56 Championship Tour victories. Slater is also the oldest surfer still active on the World Surf League, winning his 8th Billabong Pipeline Masters title at age 49.

#6289

Mickey Spillane

Mickey Spillane

#6298

Overall Influence

1918 - 2006 (88 years)

Frank Morrison Spillane , better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, whose stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. Spillane was also an occasional actor, once even playing Hammer himself in the 1965 film The Girl Hunters.

#6290

Harlan Coben

#6299

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Harlan Coben is an American writer of mystery novels and thrillers. The plots of his novels often involve the resurfacing of unresolved or misinterpreted events in the past, murders, or fatal accidents and have multiple twists. Among his novels are two series, each involving the same protagonist set in and around New York and New Jersey; some characters appear in both.

#6291

Ted Williams

#6300

Overall Influence

1918 - 2002 (84 years)

Theodore Samuel Williams was an American professional baseball player and manager. He played his entire 19-year Major League Baseball career, primarily as a left fielder, for the Boston Red Sox from 1939 to 1960; his career was interrupted by military service during World War II and the Korean War. Nicknamed "Teddy Ballgame", "the Kid", "the Splendid Splinter", and "the Thumper", Williams is regarded as one of the greatest hitters in baseball history and to date is the last player to hit over .400 in a season. His .482 on-base percentage is the highest of all time.

#6292

Dave Thompson

#6301

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

David Thompson is an English writer who is the author of more than 100 books, largely dealing with rock and pop music, but also covering film, sports, philately, numismatics and erotica. He wrote regularly for Melody Maker and Record Collector in the 1980s, and has since contributed to magazines such as Mojo, Q, Rolling Stone and Goldmine.

#6293

Richard Powers

#6302

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2023, Powers has published thirteen novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.

#6294

Gene Spafford

#6303

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

#6295

Luís Figo

#6304

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Luís Filipe Madeira Caeiro Figo is a Portuguese former professional footballer who played as a winger for Sporting CP, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Inter Milan. He won 127 caps for the Portugal national team, a one-time record, and has been cited as one of the best players of his generation.

#6296

Peter D. Klein

#6305

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Peter David Klein is an American philosopher specializing in issues in epistemology who spent most of his career at Rutgers University. Education and career He received a BA at Earlham College , and an MA and PhD from Yale University .

#6297

John Peel

#6306

Overall Influence

1939 - 2004 (65 years)

John Robert Parker Ravenscroft , known professionally as John Peel, was an English disc jockey and radio presenter. He was the longest-serving of the original BBC Radio 1 DJs, broadcasting regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004.

#6298

Nasr Abu Zayd

#6307

Overall Influence

1943 - 2010 (67 years)

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was an Egyptian Quranic thinker, author, academic and one of the leading liberal theologians in Islam. He is famous for his project of a humanistic Quranic hermeneutics, which "challenged mainstream views" on the Quran, sparking "controversy and debate." While not denying that the Quran was of divine origin, Zayd argued that it was a "cultural product" that had to be read in the context of the language and culture of seventh century Arabs, and could be interpreted in more than one way. He also criticized the use of religion to exert political power. In 1995 an Egyptian Sha...

#6299

David Elkind

#6308

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

David Elkind is an American child psychologist and author. Elkind and his family relocated to California when he was still a teenager. He studied at the University of California at Los Angeles and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1952 and Doctorate in Philosophy in 1955. David also earned an honorary doctorate in Science at the Rhode Island College .

#6300

Joseph Pearce

#6309

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Joseph Pearce , is an English-born American writer, and Director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee, before which he held positions at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire, Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan and Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Florida.

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