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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people

#6401

Robert D. Keppel

#6410

Overall Influence

1944 - 2021 (77 years)

Robert David Keppel was an American law enforcement officer and detective. He was also an associate professor at the University of New Haven and Sam Houston State University. Keppel was known for his contributions to the investigations of Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway, and also assisted in the creation of HITS, the Homicide Investigation Tracking System.

#6402

Lionel Shriver

#6411

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Lionel Shriver is an American author and journalist who lives in the United Kingdom. Her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005. Early life and education Shriver was born Margaret Ann Shriver, in Gastonia, North Carolina, to a religious family. Her father, Donald, was a Presbyterian minister who became an academic and president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York; her mother was a homemaker. At age 15, she changed her name from Margaret Ann to Lionel because she did not like the name she had been given and, as a tomboy, felt a conventionally male ...

#6403

Jim Holt

#6412

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Jim Holt is an American journalist, popular-science author, and essayist. He has contributed to The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and Slate. In 1997 he was editor of The New Leader, a political magazine. His book Why Does the World Exist? was a 2013 New York Times bestseller.

#6404

Elio Toaff

#6413

Overall Influence

1915 - 2015 (100 years)

Elio Toaff was the Chief Rabbi of Rome from 1951 to 2002. He served as a rabbi in Venice from 1947, and in 1951 became the Chief Rabbi of Rome. Early life Toaff was born in Livorno in 1915, the son of the city's rabbi Alfredo Sabato Toaff and his wife Alice Yarch. one of four children, the others being Cesare, Renzo and Pia, He then undertook, under his father's guidance, his early religious formation at Livorno's Rabbinical College, while attending the University of Pisa where he studied law. He had difficulties finding a supervisor for his final thesis. By that time, the Fascist government ...

#6405

Miranda Fricker

Miranda Fricker

#6414

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Miranda Fricker, FBA FAAS is a British philosopher who is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, Co-Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy, and Honorary Professor at the University of Sheffield. Fricker coined the term epistemic injustice, the concept of an injustice done against someone "specifically in their capacity as a knower", and explored the concept in her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice.

#6406

Wolfgang Joop

#6415

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Wolfgang Joop is a German fashion designer. He is the founder of the fashion and cosmetics company JOOP! as well as the fashion brand Wunderkind. Early life Joop was born in Potsdam to editor and author and his wife Charlotte. He grew up on his grandparents' farm in Bornstedt until 1954, when his family moved to Braunschweig, where his father had been hired as chief-editor of cultural magazine Westermanns Monatshefte. During the GDR period, Ulla Ebert, the sister of Joop's mother, lived in the property and was financially supported for its preservation by the family from the West. After the ...

#6407

Bill Oakley

#6416

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

William Lloyd Oakley is an American television writer and producer, known for his work on the animated comedy series The Simpsons. Oakley and Josh Weinstein became best friends and writing partners at St. Albans School; Oakley then attended Harvard University and was Vice President of the Harvard Lampoon. He worked on several short-term media projects, including writing for the variety show Sunday Best, but was then unemployed for a long period.

#6408

Siad Barre

#6417

Overall Influence

1919 - 1995 (76 years)

Mohammed Siad Barre was a Somali military officer, politician and revolutionary who served as the head of state of Somalia from 21 October 1969 to 26 January 1991. Barre, a major general of the gendarmerie by profession, became President of Somalia after the 1969 coup d'état that overthrew the Somali Republic following the assassination of President Abdirashid Shermarke. The Supreme Revolutionary Council military junta under Barre reconstituted Somalia as a one-party Marxist–Leninist communist state, renamed the country the Somali Democratic Republic and adopted scientific socialism .

#6409

Madhan Karky

#6418

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Madhan Karky Vairamuthu is an Indian lyricist, screenwriter, research associate, software engineer, and entrepreneur. A holder of a doctorate in computer science from the University of Queensland, Karky began his professional career as an assistant professor at the College of Engineering, Guindy, and soon after ventured into the Tamil film industry, working as a lyricist and dialogue writer. He resigned from his teaching profession in early 2013 and began working full-time in the film industry, while also launching the Karky Research Foundation , an educational research organization which primarily focuses on language computing and language literacy.

#6410

Bill Felstiner

#6419

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

William L. F. Felstiner , usually known as Bill Felstiner, is a socio-legal scholar. Education and early career Bill Felstiner was born in New York, and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale College. He received his LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1958. In 1965, he was hired as regional legal advisor of the USAID Mission to Greece & Turkey and in due course appointed assistant director of the US AID Mission to India .

#6411

Mel Gibson

#6420

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson is an American actor, film director and producer. He is best known for his action hero roles, particularly his breakout role as Max Rockatansky in the first three films of the post-apocalyptic action series Mad Max and as Martin Riggs in the buddy cop action-comedy film series Lethal Weapon.

#6412

Roy Keane

#6421

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Roy Maurice Keane is an Irish football pundit, former coach and former professional player. He is the joint most successful Irish footballer of all time, having won 19 major trophies in his club career, 17 of which came during his time at English club Manchester United. Regarded as one of the best midfielders of his generation, he was named by Pelé in the FIFA 100 list of the world's greatest living players in 2004. Noted for his hardened and brash demeanour, he was ranked at No. 11 on The Times list of the 50 "hardest" footballers in history in 2007. Keane was inducted into the Premier Leagu...

#6413

Nikolai Amosov

#6422

Overall Influence

1913 - 2002 (89 years)

Nikolai Mikhailovich Amosov, Doctor of Science, Professor , also known as Mykola Mykhailovych Amosov was a Soviet and Ukrainian doctor, heart surgeon, inventor, best-selling author, and exercise enthusiast, known for his inventions of several surgical procedures for treating heart defects.

#6414

Avery Dulles

#6423

Overall Influence

1918 - 2008 (90 years)

Avery Robert Dulles was an American Jesuit priest, theologian, and cardinal of the Catholic Church. Dulles served on the faculty of Woodstock College from 1960 to 1974, of the Catholic University of America from 1974 to 1988, and as the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University from 1988 to 2008. He was also an internationally known author and lecturer.

#6415

James Franklin

#6424

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

James Franklin is an Australian philosopher, mathematician and historian of ideas. Life and career Franklin was educated at St. Joseph's College, Hunters Hill, New South Wales. His undergraduate work was at the University of Sydney , where he attended St John's College and he was influenced by philosophers David Stove and David Armstrong. He completed his PhD in 1981 at the University of Warwick, on algebraic groups. Since 1981 he has taught in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales.

#6416

Roger Garrison

#6425

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Roger Wayne Garrison is an American professor of economics at Auburn University, and an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of the book Time and Money, which presents a graphical framework for capital-based macroeconomics and analyzes the effects of monetary policy on capital markets. It also offers a critique of Keynesian macroeconomic analysis. Garrison received an electrical engineering degree in 1967 from the University of Missouri–Rolla and a master's degree in economics from the University of Missouri–Kansas City in 1974. Garrison received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia in 1981.

#6417

Richard M. Freeland

#6426

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Richard Middleton Freeland was president of Northeastern University from 1996 to 2006 and served as the Commissioner of Higher Education for Massachusetts from 2008 until 2015. Freeland grew up in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, and was a 1959 graduate of Mountain Lakes High School; he was inducted into the school's hall of fame in 2014. He was granted a bachelor's degree in American Studies from Amherst College and a doctorate in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.

#6418

Derek Abbott

#6427

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Derek Abbott is a British-Australian physicist and electronic engineer. He was born in South Kensington, London, UK. From 1969 to 1971, he was a boarder at Copthorne Preparatory School, Sussex. From 1971 to 1978, he attended the Holland Park School London.

#6419

Norman R. Pace

#6428

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Norman Richard Pace Jr. is an American biochemist, and is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado. He is principal investigator at the Pace lab.

#6420

James C. Liao

#6429

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

James C. Liao is the Parsons Foundation Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles and is the co-founder and lead scientific advisor of Easel Biotechnologies, LLC.

#6421

Ilya Kabakov

#6430

Overall Influence

1933 - 2023 (90 years)

Ilya Iosifovich Kabakov was a Russian–American conceptual artist, born in Dnipropetrovsk in what was then the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union. He worked for thirty years in Moscow, from the 1950s until the late 1980s. After that he lived and worked on Long Island, United States.

#6422

Donald Prothero

Donald Prothero

#6431

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Donald Ross Prothero is an American geologist, paleontologist, and author who specializes in mammalian paleontology and magnetostratigraphy, a technique to date rock layers of the Cenozoic era and its use to date the climate changes which occurred 30–40 million years ago. He is the author or editor of more than 30 books and over 300 scientific papers, including at least 5 geology textbooks.

#6423

Gita Gopinath

#6432

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Gita Gopinath is an Indian-American economist who has served as the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund , since 21 January 2022. She had previously served as chief economist of the IMF between 2019 and 2022.

#6424

Avishai Margalit

Avishai Margalit

#6433

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Avishai Margalit is an Israeli professor emeritus in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2011, he served as the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

#6425

W. Montgomery Watt

W. Montgomery Watt

#6434

Overall Influence

1909 - 2006 (97 years)

William Montgomery Watt was a Scottish Orientalist, historian, academic, and Anglican priest. From 1964 to 1979, he was Professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Edinburgh. Watt was one of the foremost non-Muslim interpreters of Islam in the West, and according to Carole Hillenbrand "an enormously influential scholar in the field of Islamic studies and a much-revered name for many Muslims all over the world". Watt's comprehensive biography of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, Muhammad at Mecca and Muhammad at Medina , are considered to be classics in the field.

#6426

John Zizioulas

#6435

Overall Influence

1931 - 2023 (92 years)

John Zizioulas was a Greek Orthodox bishop who served as the Metropolitan of Pergamon of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople from 1986 until his death in 2023. He was one of the most influential Orthodox Christian theologians of the 20th and 21st centuries.

#6427

Carmen Ortiz

#6436

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Carmen Milagros Ortiz is an attorney, college instructor, and former United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. In 2009, she was nominated to the position by President Barack Obama. Ortiz was both the first woman and the first Hispanic to serve as U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts. She succeeded Michael Sullivan in that position, with Michael J. Loucks serving as the interim U.S. Attorney between Sullivan's resignation and Ortiz's confirmation. Noteworthy prosecutions by her office include those of Whitey Bulger, Tarek Mehanna, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as well as the controversial ...

#6428

David Landes

#6437

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

David Saul Landes was a professor of economics and of history at Harvard University. He is the author of Bankers and Pashas, Revolution in Time, The Unbound Prometheus, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, and Dynasties. Such works have received both praise for detailed retelling of economic history, as well as scorn on charges of Eurocentrism, a charge he openly embraced, arguing that an explanation for an economic miracle that happened originally only in Europe must of necessity be a Eurocentric analysis.

#6429

Louis van Gaal

#6438

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Aloysius Paulus Maria "Louis" van Gaal is a Dutch former football player and manager. At club level, he served as manager of Ajax, Barcelona, AZ Alkmaar, Bayern Munich and Manchester United, as well as having three spells in charge of the Netherlands national team. Van Gaal is one of the greatest and most decorated managers in the history of the game, having won 20 major honours in his managerial career. He is sometimes nicknamed the "Iron Tulip".

#6430

Niko Bolas

#6439

Overall Influence

Niko Bolas is an American music producer, sound engineer, and consultant. He is also a business developer in the fields of virtual reality and Internet radio. In 1989, Bolas founded Fakespace Music with Mark Bolas, Ian McDowall, and Christian Greuel. In 1995, Fakespace developed the Soundsculpt Toolkit, a software interface which lets music communicate with graphical elements of virtual reality.

#6431

Helen McCarthy

#6440

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Helen McCarthy is the British author of such anime reference books as 500 Manga Heroes and Villains, Anime!, The Anime Movie Guide and Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation. She is the co-author of The Erotic Anime Movie Guide and the exhaustive The Anime Encyclopedia with Jonathan Clements. She also designs needlework and textile art.

#6432

Patrick Ewing

#6441

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Patrick Aloysius Ewing Sr. is a Jamaican-American basketball coach and former professional player who last coached for the Georgetown University men's team. He played most of his career as the starting center for the New York Knicks of the National Basketball Association before ending his playing career with brief stints with the Seattle SuperSonics and Orlando Magic. Ewing is regarded as one of the greatest centers of all time, playing a dominant role in the New York Knicks 1990s success.

#6433

Myles Burnyeat

#6442

Overall Influence

1939 - 2019 (80 years)

Myles Fredric Burnyeat was an English scholar of ancient philosophy. Early life and education Myles Burnyeat was born on 1 January 1939 to Peter James Anthony Burnyeat and Cynthia Cherry Warburg. He received his secondary school education at Bryanston School.

#6434

Anthony Zinni

#6443

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Anthony Charles Zinni is a former United States Marine Corps general and a former Commander in Chief of the United States Central Command . From 2001 to 2003, he served as a special envoy for the United States to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. From 2017 to 2019, he served as a special envoy to help resolve the Qatar diplomatic crisis.

#6435

Helena Rasiowa

#6444

Overall Influence

1917 - 1994 (77 years)

Helena Rasiowa was a Polish mathematician. She worked in the foundations of mathematics and algebraic logic. Early years Rasiowa was born in Vienna on 20 June 1917 to Polish parents. As soon as Poland regained its independence in 1918, the family settled in Warsaw. Helena's father was a railway specialist. She exhibited many different skills and interests, from music to business management and the most important of her interests, mathematics.

#6436

André Neveu

#6445

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

André Neveu is a French physicist working on string theory and quantum field theory who coinvented the Neveu–Schwarz algebra and the Gross–Neveu model. Biography Neveu studied in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure . In 1969 he received his diploma at University of Paris XI in Orsay with and Claude Bouchiat and in 1971 he completed his doctorate there.

#6437

András Hajnal

#6446

Overall Influence

1931 - 2016 (85 years)

András Hajnal was a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences known for his work in set theory and combinatorics. Biography Hajnal was born on 13 May 1931, in Budapest, Hungary.

#6438

David Goodstein

#6447

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

David Louis Goodstein is an American physicist and educator. From 1988 to 2007 he served as Vice-provost of the California Institute of Technology , where he is also a professor of physics and applied physics, as well as the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor.

#6439

David Laibson

#6448

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

David Isaac Laibson is a professor of economics at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1994. His research focuses on macroeconomics, intertemporal choice, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics. In 2016, he became chairman of the Harvard economics department.

#6440

Eileen Myles

#6449

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." The Boston Globe described them as "that rare creature, a rock star of poetry." In 2012, Myles received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow , which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life. Myles uses they/them pronouns.

#6441

Peter J. Katzenstein

#6450

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Peter Joachim Katzenstein FBA is a German-American political scientist. He is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. Katzenstein has made influential contributions to the fields of comparative politics, international relations, and international political economy.

#6442

Atta ur Rehman Khan

#6451

Overall Influence

Atta ur Rehman Khan is a computer scientist and academician who has contributed to multiple domains of the field. According to a Stanford University report, he is among World's Top 2% Scientists. He is the founder of National Cyber Crime Forensics Lab Pakistan, which operates in partnership with NR3C. He has published numerous research articles and books. He is a senior member of IEEE and ACM.

#6443

Parviz Moin

#6452

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Parviz Moin is a fluid dynamicist. He is the Franklin P. and Caroline M. Johnson Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Moin has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited author in engineering.

#6444

Robert Dallek

#6453

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Robert A. Dallek is an American historian specializing in the presidents of the United States, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He retired as a history professor at Boston University in 2004 and previously taught at Columbia University, the University of California, Los Angeles , and Oxford University. He won the Bancroft Prize for his 1979 book Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 as well as other awards for scholarship and teaching.

#6445

Jean-Paul Fitoussi

Jean-Paul Fitoussi

#6454

Overall Influence

1942 - 2022 (80 years)

Jean-Paul Fitoussi was a French economist and sociologist of Sephardi Jewish descent. Biography Born in La Goulette, French Protectorate of Tunisia, Fitoussi earned his Ph.D. cum laude in Law and Economics from the University of Strasbourg. From 1979 until 1983, he was a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, and a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1984. He was a professor of economics at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, where he taught since 1982. He was also Professor Emeritus at LUISS "Guido Carli" University, in Rome. From 1...

#6446

David Williams

#6455

Overall Influence

1950 - 2009 (59 years)

David Williams was an American guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer, best known as a prominent session guitarist for stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson. Background Williams grew up in Newport News, Virginia. At a young age he was influenced by jazz artists such as Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery.

#6447

Brian Clough

#6456

Overall Influence

1935 - 2004 (69 years)

Brian Howard Clough was an English football player and manager, primarily known for his successes as a manager with Derby County and Nottingham Forest. He is one of four managers to have won the English league with two different clubs. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest managers of all time. Charismatic, outspoken and often controversial, his achievements with Derby and Forest, two clubs with little prior history of success, are rated among the greatest in football history. His teams were also noted for playing attractive football and for their good sportsmanship. Despite appl...

#6448

Marcello Lippi

#6457

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Marcello Romeo Lippi is an Italian former professional football player and manager, who led the Italy national team to victory in the 2006 FIFA World Cup. He was appointed as Italy head coach in the summer of 2004 and 2008, and he was succeeded by Cesare Prandelli after a disappointing performance in the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

#6449

Steve Omohundro

Steve Omohundro

#6458

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Stephen Malvern Omohundro is an American computer scientist whose areas of research include Hamiltonian physics, dynamical systems, programming languages, machine learning, machine vision, and the social implications of artificial intelligence. His current work uses rational economics to develop safe and beneficial intelligent technologies for better collaborative modeling, understanding, innovation, and decision making.

#6450

Tony Schiavone

#6459

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Noah Anthony Schiavone is an American sports announcer, professional wrestling commentator and podcaster. He currently signed to All Elite Wrestling where he serves as the play-by-play commentator for Collision, color commentator for Dynamite and Rampage, then also as senior producer. He has previously worked for Jim Crockett Promotions, the World Wrestling Federation , World Championship Wrestling , and Major League Wrestling . In addition to his work in wrestling, Schiavone has also worked as a broadcaster for the Gwinnett Braves/Stripers of Minor League Baseball and Georgia Bulldogs foot...

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