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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List of the most influential people

#6451

Charles Beitz

#6460

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Charles R. Beitz is an American political theorist. He is Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where he has been director of the University Center for Human Values and director of the Program in Political Philosophy. His philosophical and teaching interests focus on global political theory, democratic theory, the theory of human rights and theories of property.

#6452

Monique Wittig

#6461

Overall Influence

1935 - 2003 (68 years)

Monique Wittig was a French author, philosopher and feminist theorist who wrote about abolition of the sex-class system and coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". Her groundbreaking work is titled The Straight Mind and Other Essays. She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères , was a landmark in lesbian feminism.

#6453

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Dipesh Chakrabarty

#6462

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Dipesh Chakrabarty is an Indian historian and leading scholar of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies. He is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in history at the University of Chicago, and is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, named after Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, that recognizes social scientists for significant academic and public contributions to humanity.

#6454

Hugh Hewitt

#6463

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Hugh Hewitt is an American radio talk show host with the Salem Radio Network and an attorney, academic, and author. He writes about law, society, politics, and media bias in the United States. Hewitt is a former official in the Reagan administration, the former president and CEO of the Richard Nixon Foundation, a law professor at Chapman University School of Law, a columnist for The Washington Post, and a regular political commentator on Fox News.

#6455

Martin O'Neill

#6464

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Martin Hugh Michael O'Neill, is a Northern Irish professional football manager and former player who played as a midfielder. After a brief early career in the Irish League, O'Neill moved to England where he spent most of his playing career with Nottingham Forest. He won the First Division title in 1977–78 and the European Cup twice, in 1979 and 1980. He was cappedped 64 times for the Northern Ireland national football team, also captaininging the side at the 1982 World Cup.

#6456

Don Ihde

#6465

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Don Ihde is an American philosopher of science and technology. In 1979 he wrote what is often identified as the first North American work on philosophy of technology, Technics and Praxis. Before his retirement, Ihde was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 2013 Ihde received the Golden Eurydice Award.

#6457

Herbert Aptheker

Herbert Aptheker

#6466

Overall Influence

1915 - 2003 (88 years)

Herbert Aptheker was an American Marxist historian and political activist. He wrote more than 50 books, mostly in the fields of African-American history and general U.S. history, most notably, American Negro Slave Revolts , a classic in the field. He also compiled the 7-volume Documentary History of the Negro People . In addition, he compiled a wide variety of primary documents supporting study of African-American history. He was the literary executor for W. E. B. Du Bois.

#6458

David Boggs

#6467

Overall Influence

1950 - 2022 (72 years)

David Reeves Boggs was an American electrical and radio engineer who developed early prototypes of Internet protocolss, file servers, gatewayss, network interface cards and, along with Robert Metcalfe and others, co-invented Ethernet, the most popular family of technologies for local area computer networkss.

#6459

James Boyd White

#6468

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

James Boyd White is an American law professor, literary critic, scholar and philosopher who is generally credited with founding the "law and Literature" movement. He is a proponent of the analysis of constitutive rhetoric in the analysis of legal texts.

#6460

Anatoly Liberman

#6469

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Anatoly Liberman is a linguist, medievalist, etymologist, poet, translator of poetry , and literary critic. Liberman is Professor of Germanic Philology in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic and Dutch at the University of Minnesota, where since 1975 he has taught courses on the history of all the Germanic languages and literatures, folklore, mythology, lexicography, European structuralism and Russian formalism. He has published works on Germanic historical phonetics, English etymology, mythology/folklore, the history of philology, and poetic translation. He publishes a blog, "The Oxford ...

#6461

Paul Ching Wu Chu

#6470

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Paul Ching Wu Chu is a Chinese-American physicist specializing in superconductivity, magnetism, and dielectrics. He is a professor of physics and T.L.L. Temple Chair of Science in the Physics Department at the University of Houston College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. He was the president of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology from 2001 to 2009. In 1987, he was one of the first scientists to demonstrate high-temperature superconductivity.

#6462

Michael Grätzel

Michael Grätzel

#6471

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Michael Grätzel is a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where he directs the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces. He pioneered research on energy and electron transfer reactions in mesoscopic-materials and their optoelectronic applications. He co-invented with Brian O'Regan the Grätzel cell in 1988.

#6463

Lionel W. McKenzie

#6472

Overall Influence

1919 - 2010 (91 years)

Lionel Wilfred McKenzie was an American economist. He was the Wilson Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Rochester. He was born in Montezuma, Georgia. He completed undergraduate studies at Duke University in 1939 and subsequently moved to Oxford that year as a Rhodes Scholar. McKenzie worked with the Cowles Commission while it was in Chicago and served as an assistant professor at Duke from 1948 to 1957. Having received his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1956, McKenzie moved to Rochester where he was responsible for the establishment of the graduate program in economics.

#6464

Jean Vanier

#6473

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Jean Vanier was a Canadian Catholic philosopher and theologian. In 1964, he founded L'Arche, an international federation of communities spread over 37 countries for people with developmental disabilities and those who assist them. In 1971, he co-founded Faith and Light with Marie-Hélène Mathieu, which also works for people with developmental disabilities, their families, and friends in over 80 countries. He continued to live as a member of the original L'Arche community in Trosly-Breuil, France, until his death.

#6465

Robert Kane

#6474

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Robert Hilary Kane is an American philosopher. He is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently on phased retirement. He is the author of Free Will and Values , Through the Moral Maze , and The Significance of Free Will . He also edited the Oxford Handbook of Free Will and has published many articles in the philosophy of mind and action, ethics, the theory of values and philosophy of religion.

#6466

Edward P. Jones

#6475

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Edward Paul Jones is an American novelist and short story writer. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award for his 2003 novel The Known World. Biography Edward Paul Jones was born and raised in Washington, D.C. He was educated at Cardozo High School, the College of the Holy Cross, and the University of Virginia.

#6467

Brené Brown

#6476

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Casandra Brené Brown is an American professor, author, and podcast host. Brown is known for her work on shame, vulnerability, and leadership, and for her widely viewed TEDx talk in 2010. She has written six number-one New York Times bestselling books and hosted two podcasts on Spotify.

#6468

S. M. Stirling

#6477

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Stephen Michael Stirling is a Canadian-American science fiction and fantasy author who was born in France. Stirling is well known for his Draka series of alternate history novels and his later time travel/alternate history Nantucket series and Emberverse series.

#6469

Maynard Solomon

#6478

Overall Influence

1930 - 2020 (90 years)

Maynard Elliott Solomon was an American music executive and musicologist, a co-founder of Vanguard Records as well as a music producer. Later, he became known for his biographical studies of Viennese Classical composers, specifically Beethoven , Mozart , and Schubert. Solomon was the first to openly propose the highly disputed theory of Schubert's homosexuality in a scholarly setting.

#6470

Alvin M. Weinberg

Alvin M. Weinberg

#6479

Overall Influence

1915 - 2006 (91 years)

Alvin Martin Weinberg was an American nuclear physicist who was the administrator of Oak Ridge National Laboratory during and after the Manhattan Project. He came to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1945 and remained there until his death in 2006. He was the first to use the term "Faustian bargain" to describe nuclear energy.

#6471

Jordan Ellenberg

Jordan Ellenberg

#6480

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

#6472

Glanville Williams

#6481

Overall Influence

1911 - 1997 (86 years)

Glanville Llewelyn Williams was a Welsh legal scholar who was the Rouse Ball Professor of English Law at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1978 and the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, London, from 1945 to 1955. He has been described as Britain's foremost scholar of criminal law.

#6473

Colin Richardson

#6482

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Colin Richardson is a British record producer, mixer and recording engineer. He has worked on over 100 albums and is most frequently associated with heavy metal and its subgenres. Career Some of the bands he has worked for include: 3 Inches of BloodAnathemaAnonymusAs I Lay DyingBehemothBolt ThrowerBullet for My ValentineCannibal CorpseCarcassThe ChameleonsThe ChangeChimairaCradle of FilthCrashCrashCRUSHER franceDÅÅTHDearly BeheadedDevilDriverDisincarnateEluveitieFear FactoryFightstarFive Pointe OFuneral for a FriendGBHGodfleshGod ForbidGorefestGorgutsHamletHeaven Shall BurnInMeKataklysmKreator...

#6474

Marcia Angell

#6483

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Marcia Angell is an American physician, author, and the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

#6475

Angelika Kratzer

#6484

Overall Influence

Angelika Kratzer is a professor emerita of linguistics in the department of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Biography She was born in Germany, and received her PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1979, with a dissertation entitled Semantik der Rede. She is an influential and widely cited semanticist whose expertise includes modals, conditionals, situation semantics, and a range of topics relating to the syntax–semantics interface.

#6476

Rolf Landauer

#6485

Overall Influence

1927 - 1999 (72 years)

Rolf William Landauer was a German-American physicist who made important contributions in diverse areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disordered media. Born in Germany, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1938, obtained a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1950, and then spent most of his career at IBM.

#6477

Vince Carter

#6486

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Vincent Lamar Carter Jr. is an American former professional basketball player who serves as a basketball analyst for YES Network and formerly ESPN. He primarily played the shooting guard and small forward positions, but occasionally played power forward later in his NBA career. He was an eight-time All-Star and a two-time All-NBA Team selection. He is the only player in NBA history to play as many as 22 seasons and in four different decades, from his debut in 1999 to his retirement in 2020. He was the scoring leader on the 2000 United States Men’s Olympic Basketball Team where the USA defeated France to win the nation’s twelfth Men’s Basketball Olympic gold medal.

#6478

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem

#6487

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.

#6479

Lionel Richie

#6488

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Lionel Brockman Richie Jr. is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, and television personality. He rose to fame in the 1970s as a songwriter and the co-lead singer of the Motown group Commodores; writing and recording the hit singles "Easy", "Sail On", "Three Times a Lady" and "Still", with the group before his departure. In 1980, he wrote and produced the US Billboard Hot 100 number one single "Lady" for Kenny Rogers.

#6480

Thomas Sterling

Thomas Sterling

#6489

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Thomas Sterling is a full professor for the Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. At IU, he is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Computing Systems Laboratory . He received his Ph.D in 1984 at MIT. For more than four decades, Thomas Sterling has dedicated his professional contributions to research for advancements in parallel high-performance computing. Dr. Sterling is best known as the “father of Beowulf” clusters. Among his other early accomplishments, Dr. Sterling was Principal investigator for the multi-agency multi-institution Hybrid Technology Multi-Threaded Project for advanced research on Petaflops computing systems.

#6481

Albrecht Wellmer

Albrecht Wellmer

#6490

Overall Influence

1933 - 2018 (85 years)

Albrecht Wellmer was a German philosopher at the Freie Universität Berlin. Biography He studied mathematics and physics at Berlin and Kiel, then philosophy and sociology at Heidelberg and Frankfurt. He was an assistant to Jürgen Habermas at the University of Frankfurt from 1966 to 1970. He has held Professorships at the Universität Konstanz , the New School for Social Research and at the Freie Universität Berlin . He has held guest Professorships at Haverford, Stony Brook, Collège International de Philosophie, the New School of Social Research and the University of Amsterdam.

#6482

Valentin Turchin

Valentin Turchin

#6491

Overall Influence

1931 - 2010 (79 years)

Valentin Fyodorovich Turchin was a Soviet and American physicist, cybernetician, and computer scientist. He developed the Refal programming language, the theory of metasystem transitions and the notion of supercompilation. He was as a pioneer in artificial intelligence and a proponent of the global brain hypothesis.

#6483

Michael Ellman

#6492

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Michael John Ellman has been a professor of economics at the University of Amsterdam since 1978. He is now an emeritus professor. He has written on the economics of the Soviet Union, transition economics, Russia and comparative economic systems.

#6484

Richard Sapper

#6493

Overall Influence

1932 - 2015 (83 years)

Richard Sapper was a German industrial designer who was based in Milan, Italy for much of his career. He is considered one of the most influential designers of his generation. His products typically feature a combination of technical innovation, simplicity of form, and an element of wit and surprise. He received numerous international design awards, including 11 Compasso d'Oro awards and the Raymond Loewy Foundation's . Examples of his work are held in many museums around the world, including the Victoria and Albert and Design Museum in London, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the ADI Design Mu...

#6485

Michael Coogan

#6494

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Michael D. Coogan is lecturer on Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at Harvard Divinity School, Director of Publications for the Harvard Semitic Museum, editor-in-chief of Oxford Biblical Studies Online, and professor emeritus of religious studies at Stonehill College. He has also taught at Fordham University, Boston College, Wellesley College, and the University of Waterloo . Coogan has also participated in and directed archaeological excavations in Israel, Jordan, Cyprus, and Egypt, and has lectured widely.

#6486

Jeff Garlin

#6495

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Jeffrey Garlin is an American stand-up comedian and actor. He is best known for playing Murray Goldberg, patriarch of the eponymous family in the ABC sitcom The Goldbergs, and Jeff Greene on the HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm. He also played Marvin on Mad About You and Mort Meyers on Arrested Development for Fox and Netflix.

#6487

C. S. Seshadri

#6496

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Conjeevaram Srirangachari Seshadri was an Indian mathematician. He was the founder and director-emeritus of the Chennai Mathematical Institute, and is known for his work in algebraic geometry. The Seshadri constant is named after him. He was also known for his collaboration with mathematician M. S. Narasimhan, for their proof of the Narasimhan–Seshadri theorem which proved the necessary conditions for stable vector bundles on a Riemann surface.

#6488

Richie Zito

#6497

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Richie Zito is an American songwriter, composer and record producer from Los Angeles. In a career spanning more than 50 years, Zito has experienced success as a prolific session musician, being featured on a wide array of other artists' recordings, including work with Joe Cocker, White Lion, Poison, Mr. Big, Neil Sedaka, Yvonne Elliman, Charlie Sexton, Eric Carmen, Art Garfunkel, Leo Sayer, Diana Ross, Marc Tanner, Elton John, Cher, The Motels, as well as The Cult, Eddie Money, Heart, Juliet Simms, Bad English and Prism.

#6489

Lorie Tarshis

#6498

Overall Influence

1911 - 1993 (82 years)

Lorie Tarshis was a Canadian economist who taught mostly at Stanford University. He is credited with writing the first introductory textbook that brought Keynesian thinking into American university classrooms, the 1947 Elements of Economics. The work swiftly lost popularity after it was charged with excessive sympathy to communism by McCarthyist activists. Instead, the 1948 Economics by Paul Samuelson brought the Keynesian revolution to the United States.

#6490

David Guetta

#6499

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Pierre David Guetta is a French DJ and music producer. He has sold over 10 million albums and 65 million singles globally, with more than 14 billion streams. In 2011, 2020, 2021 and 2023, Guetta was voted the number one DJ in the DJ Mag Top 100 DJs poll. In 2013, Billboard ranked his song "When Love Takes Over" as the number one dance-pop collaboration of all time.

#6491

Stephanie Coontz

Stephanie Coontz

#6500

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Stephanie Coontz is an American author, historian, and faculty member at Evergreen State College. She teaches history and family studies and is Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families, which she chaired from 2001 to 2004. Coontz has authored and co-edited several books about the history of the family and marriage.

#6492

Brian Behlendorf

Brian Behlendorf

#6501

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Brian Behlendorf is an American technologist, executive, computer programmer and leading figure in the open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Software Foundation. Behlendorf served as president of the foundation for three years. He has served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003, Benetech since 2009, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2013. Behlendorf served as the General Manager of the Open Source S...

#6493

Peggy Kamuf

#6502

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Peggy Kamuf is the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is one of the primary English translators of the works of Jacques Derrida. She received the American Comparative Literature Association's 2006 René Wellek Prize for her 2005 work Book of Addresses.

#6494

Robert Mills

#6503

Overall Influence

1928 - 1999 (71 years)

Robert Laurence Mills was an American physicist, specializing in quantum field theory, the theory of alloys, and many-body theory. While sharing an office at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Chen-Ning Yang and Robert Mills formulated in 1954 a theory now known as the Yang–Mills theory – "the foundation for current understanding of how subatomic particles interact, a contribution which has restructured modern physics and mathematics."

#6495

Paul Bloom

#6504

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

#6496

Elaine Scarry

#6505

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Elaine Scarry is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain, and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law. She was formerly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.

#6497

Renu Khator

#6506

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Renu Khator is the fifth chancellor of the University of Houston System and the thirteenth president of the University of Houston. In 2008, she became the first female chancellor in the state of Texas and the first Indian immigrant to lead a comprehensive research university in the U.S.

#6498

Blake Morrison

#6507

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Philip Blake Morrison FRSL is an English poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? , which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If. Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

#6499

John M. Darley

#6508

Overall Influence

1938 - 2018 (80 years)

John M. Darley was an American social psychologist and professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. Darley is best known, in collaboration with Bibb Latané, for developing theories that aim to explain why people might not intervene at the scene of an emergency when others are present; this phenomenon is known as the bystander effect and the accompanying diffusion of responsibility effect. This work stemmed from the tragic case of Kitty Genovese, a New Yorker who was murdered in March 1964 while 38 people either witnessed or heard her struggling with the assailant. Darl...

#6500

Marcos Pérez Jiménez

#6509

Overall Influence

1914 - 2001 (87 years)

Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez was a Venezuelan military and general officer of the Army of Venezuela and the dictator of Venezuela from 1950 to 1958, ruling as member of the military junta from 1950 to 1952 and as president from 1952 to 1958. He took part in the 1948 coup d'état, becoming part of the ruling junta. He ran in the 1952 election. However, the junta cancelled the election when early results indicated that the opposition was ahead, and declared Jiménez provisional president. He became president in 1953 and instituted a constitution that granted him dictatorial powers.

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