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
#6501
Jhumpa Lahiri
#6510
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is an Indian American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian. Her debut collection of short-stories Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake , was adapted into the popular film of the same name.
Go to Profile#6502
Menachem Elon
#6511
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
Menachem Elon was an Israeli jurist and Professor of Law specializing in Mishpat Ivri, an Orthodox rabbi, and a prolific author on traditional Jewish law . He was the head of the Jewish Law Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#6503
Muhammadu Buhari
#6512
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Muhammadu Buhari is a Nigerian politician who served as the president of Nigeria from 2015 to 2023. A retired Nigerian army major general, he served as the country's military head of state from 31 December 1983 to 27 August 1985, after taking power from the Shehu Shagari civilian government in a military coup d'état. The term Buharism is used to describe the authoritarian policies of his military regime.
Go to Profile#6504
Robert Doisneau
#6513
Overall Influence
1912 - 1994 (82 years)
Robert Doisneau was a French photographer. From the 1930s, he photographed the streets of Paris. He was a champion of humanist photography and with Henri Cartier-Bresson a pioneer of photojournalism.
Go to Profile#6505
Daniel B. Wallace
#6514
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Daniel Baird Wallace is an American professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He is also the founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, the purpose of which is digitizing all known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament via digital photographs.
Go to Profile#6506
Albert Eschenmoser
#6515
Overall Influence
1925 - 2023 (98 years)
Albert Jakob Eschenmoser was a Swiss organic chemist, best known for his work on the synthesis of complex heterocyclic natural compounds, most notably vitamin B12. In addition to his significant contributions to the field of organic synthesis, Eschenmoser pioneered work in the Origins of Life field with work on the synthetic pathways of artificial nucleic acids. Before retiring in 2009, Eschenmoser held tenured teaching positions at the ETH Zurich and The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California as well as visiting professorships at the ...
Go to Profile#6507
Taner Akçam
#6516
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Altuğ Taner Akçam is a Turkish-German historian and sociologist. During the 1990s, he was the first Turkish scholar to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, and has written several books on the genocide, such as A Shameful Act , From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide , The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity , and Killing Orders . He is recognized as a "leading international authority" on the subject. Akçam's frequent participation in public debates on the legacy of the genocide have been compared to Theodor Adorno's role in postwar Germany.
Go to Profile#6508
Victor J. Stenger
#6517
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Victor John Stenger was an American particle physicist, philosopher, author, and religious skeptic. Following a career as a research scientist in the field of particle physics, Stenger was associated with New Atheism and he authored popular science books. He published twelve books for general audiences on physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, philosophy, religion, atheism, and pseudoscience, including the 2007 best-seller God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. His final book was God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos . He was a regular...
Go to Profile#6509
Shlomo Sternberg
#6518
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Shlomo Zvi Sternberg , is an American mathematician known for his work in geometry, particularly symplectic geometry and Lie theory. Education and career Sternberg earned his PhD in 1955 from Johns Hopkins University, with a thesis entitled "Some Problems in Discrete Nonlinear Transformations in One and Two Dimensions", supervised by Aurel Wintner.
Go to Profile#6510
Candace Pert
#6519
Overall Influence
1946 - 2013 (67 years)
Candace Beebe Pert was an American neuroscientist and pharmacologist who discovered the opioid receptor, the cellular binding site for endorphins in the brain. Early life and education She was born on June 26, 1946, in Manhattan, New York City.
Go to Profile#6511
Daniel Levinson
#6520
Overall Influence
1920 - 1994 (74 years)
Daniel J. Levinson , a psychologist, was one of the founders of the field of positive adult development. Levinson is most well known for his theory of stage-crisis view, however he also made major contributions to the fields of behavioral, social, and developmental psychology. His interest in the social sciences began with studies on personality and authoritarianism, and eventually progressed to studies on development. Greatly influenced by the work of Erik Erikson, Elliott Jaques, and Bernice Neugarten, his stage-crisis view sought to incorporate all aspects of adult development in order to establish a more holistic approach to understanding the life cycle.
Go to Profile#6512
Derek Hitchins
#6521
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Derek K. Hitchins is a British systems engineer and was professor in engineering management, in command & control and in systems science at Cranfield University at Cranfield, Bedfordshire, England. Biography Hitchins joined the Royal Air Force in 1952 as an apprentice and retired as a wing commander in 1973 to join industry. From 1975 to 1976 he worked as the system design manager of the Tornado ADV aviation company and technical coordinator for UKAIR CCIS. From 1975 to 1979 he was head of Integrated sciences in a grammar school, teaching physics, integrated science, mathematics, electronics,...
Go to Profile#6513
Clay Felker
#6522
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Clay Schuette Felker was an American magazine editor and journalist who co-founded New York magazine in 1968. He was known for bringing numerous journalists into the profession. The New York Times wrote in 1995, "Few journalists have left a more enduring imprint on late 20th-century journalism—an imprint that was unabashedly mimicked even as it was being mocked—than Clay Felker."
Go to Profile#6514
Jason Brennan
#6523
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Jason F. Brennan is an American philosopher and business professor. He is currently the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.
Go to Profile#6515
Brian McGuinness
#6524
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Brian McGuinness was a Wittgenstein scholar best known for his translation, with David Pears, of the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus. He was christened with the forenames "Bernard Francis" but changed his name to "Brian" in his youth. He commonly published, and was cited, as B. F. McGuinness.
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Irving Kirsch
#6525
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Irving Kirsch is an American psychologist and academic. He is the Associate Director of the Program in Placebo Studies and a lecturer in medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is also professor emeritus of psychology at the Universities of Hull and Plymouth in the United Kingdom, and the University of Connecticut in the United States. Kirsch is a leading researcher within the field of placebo studies who is noted for his work on placebo effects, antidepressants, expectancy, and hypnosis. He is the originator of response expectancy theory, and his...
Go to Profile#6517
Alice S. Huang
#6526
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Alice S. Huang Early years Alice Huang's father, Quentin K. Y. Huang, was orphaned at age 12 in Anhui, China and was taken in by a missionary. He was later educated at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Divinity School, returning to China as an Anglican bishop. He later married Huang's mother, Grace Betty Soong.
Go to Profile#6518
John Wooden
#6527
Overall Influence
1910 - 2010 (100 years)
John Robert Wooden was an American basketball coach and player. Nicknamed the "Wizard of Westwood", he won ten National Collegiate Athletic Association national championships in a 12-year period as head coach for the UCLA Bruins, including a record seven in a row. No other team has won more than four in a row in Division I college men's or women's basketball. Within this period, his teams won an NCAA men's basketball record 88 consecutive games. Wooden won the prestigious Henry Iba Award as national coach of the year a record seven times and won the Associated Press award five times.
Go to Profile#6519
Will Shortz
#6528
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
William F. Shortz is an American puzzle creator and editor who is the crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in the invented field of "enigmatology". After starting his career at Penny Press and Games magazine, he was hired by The New York Times in 1993. Shortz's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament is the country's oldest and largest crossword tournament.
Go to Profile#6520
Martin Richards
#6529
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Martin Richards is a British computer scientist known for his development of the BCPL programming language which is both part of early research into portable software, and the ancestor of the B programming language invented by Ken Thompson in early versions of Unix and which Dennis Ritchie in turn used as the basis of his widely used C programming language.
Go to Profile#6521
Colin Kaepernick
#6530
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Colin Rand Kaepernick is an American civil rights activist and football quarterback who is a free agent. He played six seasons for the San Francisco 49ers in the National Football League . In 2016, he knelt during the national anthem at the start of NFL games in protest of police brutality and racial inequality in the United States.
Go to Profile#6522
Ingmar Bergman
#6531
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Ernst Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish filmmaker and theatre director. Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential film directors of all time, his films have been described as "profoundly personal meditations into the myriad struggles facing the psyche and the soul". Some of his most acclaimed works include The Seventh Seal , Wild Strawberries , Persona , and Fanny and Alexander ; these four films were included in the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time. Bergman was also ranked No. 8 on the magazine's 2002 "Greatest Directors of All Time" list.
Go to Profile#6523
Azriel Rosenfeld
#6532
Overall Influence
1931 - 2004 (73 years)
Azriel Rosenfeld was an American Research Professor, a Distinguished University Professor, and Director of the Center for Automation Research at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, where he also held affiliate professorships in the Departments of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Psychology, and a talmid chochom. He held a Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University , rabbinic ordination and a Doctor of Hebrew Literature degree from Yeshiva University, honorary Doctor of Technology degrees from Linkoping University and Oulu University , and an honorary Doctor...
Go to Profile#6524
Réka Albert
#6533
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Réka Albert is a Romanian-Hungarian scientist. She is a distinguished professor of physics and adjunct professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University and is noted for the Barabási–Albert model and research into scale-free networks and Boolean modeling of biological systems.
Go to Profile#6525
Tyrone Hayes
#6534
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Tyrone B. Hayes is an American biologist and professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research in frogs, concluding that the herbicide atrazine is an endocrine disruptor that demasculinizes male frogs, causing them to display female characteristics, through a process known as feminization. Hayes is an advocate for the critical review and regulation of pesticides as well as other chemicals that may cause adverse health effects. He has presented hundreds of papers, discussions, and seminars on his research's conclusion that environmental c...
Go to Profile#6526
Robert Krulwich
#6535
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert Louis Krulwich is an American radio and television journalist who currently serves as a science correspondent for NPR and was a co-host of the program Radiolab. He has worked as a full-time employee of ABC, CBS, National Public Radio, and Pacifica. He has done assignment pieces for ABC's Nightline and World News Tonight, as well as PBS's Frontline, NOVA, and NOW with Bill Moyers. TV Guide called him "the most inventive network reporter in television", and New York Magazine wrote that he's "the man who simplifies without being simple."
Go to Profile#6527
Strom Thurmond
#6536
Overall Influence
1902 - 2003 (101 years)
James Strom Thurmond Sr. was an American politician who represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 to shortly before his death in 2003. Prior to his 48 years as a senator, he served as the 103rd governor of South Carolina from 1947 to 1951. Thurmond was a member of the Democratic Party until 1964 when he joined the Republican Party for the remainder of his legislative career. He also ran for president in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate, receiving over a million votes and winning four states.
Go to Profile#6528
Abu Nidal
#6537
Overall Influence
1937 - 2002 (65 years)
Sabri Khalil al-Banna , known by his nom de guerre Abu Nidal, was the founder of Fatah: The Revolutionary Council , a militant Palestinian splinter group more commonly known as the Abu Nidal Organization . At the height of its militancy in the 1970s and 1980s, the ANO was widely regarded as the most ruthless of the Palestinian groups.
Go to Profile#6529
Harry Hill
#6538
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Matthew Keith Hall , known professionally as Harry Hill, is an English comedian, presenter and writer. He pursued a career in stand-up following years working as a medical doctor, developing an off-beat, energetic performance style that fused elements of surrealism, observational comedy, slapstick, satire and music. When performing, he usually wears browline glasses and a dress shirt with a distinctive oversized collar and cuffs.
Go to Profile#6530
Chris Ware
#6539
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Franklin Christenson "Chris" Ware is an American cartoonist known for his Acme Novelty Library series and the graphic novels Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth , Building Stories and Rusty Brown . His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression. He tends to use a vivid color palette and realistic, meticulous detail. His lettering and images are often elaborate and sometimes evoke the ragtime era or another early 20th-century American design style.
Go to Profile#6531
Edward J. McCluskey
#6540
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Edward Joseph McCluskey was a professor at Stanford University. He was a pioneer in the field of Electrical Engineering. Biography McCluskey was born Oct 16, 1929, in New York City. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1953 and earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956. McCluskey worked on electronic switching systems at the Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1955 to 1959. In 1959, he moved to Princeton University, where he was Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of the University Computer Center. In 1966, he joined Stanford Univ...
Go to Profile#6532
Hisashi Owada
#6541
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Hisashi Owada is a Japanese former jurist, diplomat and law professor. He served as a judge on the International Court of Justice from 2003 until June 7, 2018, and was President of the Court from 2009 to 2012. He is the father of Empress Masako and the father-in-law of the incumbent Emperor of Japan, Naruhito.
Go to Profile#6533
Amit Singhal
#6542
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Amitabh Kumar "Amit" Singhal is a former senior vice president at Google Inc., having been a Google Fellow and the head of Google's Search team for 15 years. Biography Born in Jhansi, a city in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, Singhal received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in computer science from IIT Roorkee in 1989. He continued his computer science education in the United States, and received an M.S. degree from University of Minnesota Duluth in 1991. He wrote about his time at the University of Minnesota Duluth:
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Jamie Delano
#6543
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jamie Delano is an English comic book writer. He was part of the first post-Alan Moore "British Invasion" of writers which started to feature in American comics in the 1980s. He is best known as the first writer of the comic book series Hellblazer, featuring John Constantine.
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Michael Mann
#6544
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Michael Mann FBA is a British-born emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the University of Cambridge. Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships.
Go to Profile#6536
Viktor Yushchenko
#6545
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko is a Ukrainian politician who was the third president of Ukraine from 23 January 2005 to 25 February 2010. He aimed to orient Ukraine towards the West, towards the European Union and NATO.
Go to Profile#6537
Lennox Lewis
#6546
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Lennox Claudius Lewis is a boxing commentator and former professional boxer who competed from 1989 to 2003. He is a three-time world heavyweight champion, a two-time lineal champion, and the last heavyweight to hold the undisputed championship. Holding dual British and Canadian citizenship, Lewis represented Canada as an amateur at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics; in the latter, he won a gold medal in the super-heavyweight division.
Go to Profile#6538
Janine Benyus
#6547
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Janine M. Benyus is an American natural sciences writer, innovation consultant, and author. After writing books on wildlife and animal behavior, she coined the term Biomimicry to describe intentional problem-solving design inspired by nature. Her book Biomimicry attracted widespread attention from businesspeople in design, architecture, and engineering as well as from scientists. Benyus argues that by following biomimetic approaches, designers can develop products that will perform better, be less expansive, use less energy, and leave companies less open to legal risk.
Go to Profile#6539
Theodore Hall
#6548
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
Theodore Alvin Hall was an American physicist and an atomic spy for the Soviet Union, who, during his work on United States efforts to develop the first and second atomic bombs during World War II , gave a detailed description of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, and of several processes for purifying plutonium, to Soviet intelligence. His brother, Edward N. Hall, was a rocket scientist who led the U.S. Air Force's program to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile, personally designing the Minuteman missile and convincing the Pentagon and President Eisenhower to adopt it as a key part of t...
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Richard Herring
#6549
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Richard Keith Herring is an English stand-up comedian and writer whose early work includes the comedy double act Lee and Herring . He is described by The British Theatre Guide as "one of the leading hidden masters of modern British comedy".
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Maya Plisetskaya
#6550
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Maya Mikhailovna Plisetskaya was a Soviet and Russian ballet dancer, choreographer, ballet director, and actress. In post-Soviet times, she held both Lithuanian and Spanish citizenship. She danced during the Soviet era at the Bolshoi Theatre under the directorships of Leonid Lavrovsky, then of Yury Grigorovich; later she moved into direct confrontation with him. In 1960, when famed Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova retired, Plisetskaya became prima ballerina assoluta of the company.
Go to Profile#6542
Viswanathan Anand
#6551
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Viswanathan "Vishy" Anand is an Indian chess grandmaster and a former five-time World Chess Champion. He became the first grandmaster from India in 1988, and has the eighth highest peak FIDE rating of all-time. In 2022, he was elected the deputy president of FIDE.
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Joel Garreau
#6552
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Joel Garreau is an American journalist, scholar, and author. In 1981, Garreau published The Nine Nations of North America. In 1991, he published Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. In 2005, he published Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human. He has served as a fellow at Cambridge University, a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at New America Foundation, the University of California at Berkeley and George Mason University. Previously, he was a reporter and editor at The Washington Post. He is a senior fellow at the School of Public ...
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Gordon Cormack
#6553
Overall Influence
Gordon Villy Cormack is a professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and co-inventor of Dynamic Markov Compression. Cormack's research with Maura R. Grossman has been cited in cases of first impression in United States, Ireland, and United Kingdom approving the use of technology-assisted review in civil litigation.
Go to Profile#6545
Penelope Maddy
#6554
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Penelope Maddy is UCI Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and of Mathematics at the University of California, Irvine. Maddy specializes and is known for her influential work in the philosophy of mathematics and mathematical realism. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1979. Maddy’s early work was largely a defense of the position known as mathematical realism or Platonism, in which mathematical objects (like, say, numbers) are real objects in the universe (though abstract). This position resembles that of famous mathematical realists like the great logician Kurt Gödel, though importantly Maddy also considers sets of objects real, as well.
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Robert C. Clark
#6555
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Robert C. Clark is Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus and the Austin Wakeman Scott Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School. He previously served as dean and professor of law at Harvard Law School from 1989 to 2003. Clark is recognized as a leading authority in corporate law and corporate governance.
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Rainer K. Sachs
#6556
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Rainer Kurt "Ray" Sachs is a German-American mathematical physicist, with interests in general relativistic cosmology and astrophysics, as well as a computational radiation biologist. He is professor emeritus of Mathematics and Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and adjunct professor at Tufts Medical School.
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Manning Marable
#6557
Overall Influence
1950 - 2011 (61 years)
William Manning Marable was an American professor of public affairs, history and African-American Studies at Columbia University. Marable founded and directed the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. He wrote several texts and was active in numerous progressive political causes.
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Karl Stetter
#6558
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Karl Otto Stetter is a German microbiologist and authority on astrobiology. Stetter is an expert on microbial life at high temperatures. Career Stetter was born in Munich and studied biology at the Technical University of Munich. Stetter wrote Stetter's doctoral dissertation on lactobacilli. From 1980 to 2002 Stetter was professor at, and head of, the department of microbiology and of the Archaea center of the University of Regensburg.
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Rafael Benítez
#6559
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Rafael Benítez Maudes is a Spanish professional football manager and former player who manages La Liga club Celta Vigo. Benítez joined Real Madrid's coaching staff at the age of 26, going on to work as the under-19 and reserve team coach, and assistant manager for the senior team. He moved away from Real Madrid in 1995, but management spells at Real Valladolid and Osasuna were short-lived and unsuccessful. He guided Segunda División club Extremadura back to La Liga in his first season in the 1997–98 season, but the team was relegated the following season. He left the club, and coached Tenerif...
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